Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 6 - Robert Louis Stevenson …robert-louis-stevenson.org/wp-content/uploads/jss-volume... · 2015-06-23 · in this issue, the volume Robert Louis

Journal ofStevenson Studies

Volume 6

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Journal of Stevenson Studiesii

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iiiJournal of Stevenson Studies

Editors

Professor Linda Dryden

Director, Centre for Literature

and Writing

School of Arts and Creative

Industries

Napier University

Craighouse

Edinburgh

EH10 5LG

Scotland

Tel: 0131 455 6128

Email: [email protected]

Professor Roderick Watson

English Studies

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA

Scotland

Tel: 01786 467500


Contributions to issue 7 are warmly invited and should be sent

to either of the editors listed above. The text should be submit-

ted in MS WORD files in MHRA format. All contributions are

subject to review by members of the Editorial Board.

Published by

The Centre for Scottish Studies


c. The contributors 2009

ISSN: 1744-3857

Printed and bound in the UK by

Antony Rowe Ltd.

Chippenhan, Wiltshire.

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Journal of Stevenson Studiesiv

Professor Richard Ambrosini

Universita’ di Roma Tre

Rome

Professor Stephen Arata

School of English

University of Virginia

Professor Oliver Buckton

School of English

Florida Atlantic University

Dr Jenni Calder

National Museum of Scotland

Professor Linda Dryden

School of Arts and Creative

Industries

Edinburgh Napier University

Professor Richard Dury

University of Bergamo

(Consultant Editor)

Dr Penny Fielding

Senior Lecturer

Department of English

University of Edinburgh

Professor Gordon Hirsch


University of Minnesota

Professor Katherine Linehan


Oberlin College

Ohio

Professor Barry Menikoff


University of Hawaii at

Manoa

Professor Glenda Norquay

Department of English and

Cultural History

Liverpool John Moores

University

Professor Marshall Walker


The University of Waikato

Professor Roderick Watson


Studies


Editorial Board

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vJournal of Stevenson Studies

ContentsEditorial.................................................................................. 1

Matthew Kaiser

Mapping Stevenson’s rhetorics of play ................................. ...5

Nathalie JaëckTo jump or not to jump: Stevenson’s kidnapping of adventure ........................................................23

Burkhard NiederhoffUnreliable narration in The Master of Ballantrae: an external approach ..............................................................43

Hilary J. BeattieStormy nights and headless women: heterosexual conflict and desire in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson ..........................................................63

Gordon HirschThe rejection of dichotomous thinking in Stevenson’s literary essays ...................................................................... ...81

Rosella MallardiStevenson and Conrad: colonial imagination and photography ........................................................................ ...97

Sylvie Largeaud-OrtegaStevenson’s ‘little tale’ is ‘a library’: an anthropological approach to ‘The Beach of Falesá’ .........................................117

Laavanyan RatnapalanStevenson’s anthropology of the Pacific Islands ............... ...135

Tania Zulli‘A phrase of Virgil speaks of English places’: Classical and European literature in R. L. Stevenson’s South Sea Tales ...151

Nancy BungeThe Calvinistic romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ....................... ...167

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Journal of Stevenson Studiesvi

Andrew De YoungThe case of the missing detective: detection, deception, and delicacy in Jekyll and Hyde ...........................................181

Nicoletta BrazzelliMaps, treasures and imaginary lands: Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines as a response to Stevenson’s Treasure Island ................................................................. ...199

Sara RizzoGraphic visions of Dr Jekyll .............................................. ...215

Reviews ...............................................................................225

Contributors ......................................................................243

JSS Notes ............................................................................247

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1Journal of Stevenson Studies

Editorial

Almost all the essays in this issue are versions of papers first pre-

sented at the 2008 Bergamo conference ‘RLS 2008: European

Stevenson’, though this is only a selection from many excellent

contributions. Other papers from Bergamo, on more specifi-

cally ‘European’ links, have been collected and edited by Richard

Ambrosini and Richard Dury to be published by Cambridge

Scholars later this year as European Stevenson, and we owe

thanks to Richard Dury and his colleagues at Bergamo for a

splendid and obviously fruitful conference. Reviewed elsewhere

in this issue, the volume Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph

Conrad: Writers of Transition (Texas Tech University Press,

2009), was derived from the Edinburgh RLS conference in 2004,

just as selected papers from the 2002 conference at Gargnano

were collected in the volume Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer

of Boundaries (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). And of

course the essays in Volume 4 of this Journal in 2007 were taken

from the Saranac conference of 2006. The impact of these RLS

biennial conferences speaks for itself, and we look forward to the

6th iteration, ‘Locating Stevenson’, which will return to Stirling

for 2010. The quality and value of such study, and the increasing

critical interest in Stevenson could not be better signalled than by

these markers, not to mention recent monographs by Julia Reid,

Oliver S. Buckton and Glenda Norquay, and the major project

which is the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of

Robert Louis Stevenson with Stephen Arata, Richard Dury and

Penny Fielding as general editors. With this link in mind Penny

Fielding has agreed to join the editorial board of the Journal of

Stevenson Studies.

We can also announce the launch of the new Robert Louis

Stevenson Website. The original site www.unibg.it/rls was found-

ed by Professor Dury in December 1996 and is now enhanced

by a new site, www.robert-louis-stephenson.org, professionally

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Journal of Stevenson Studies2

designed and easier to navigate, incorporating wholly new sec-

tions, as well as all the invaluable bibliographical and critical

material from the old format. The new sections will include

full-text downloads of past issues of the Journal of Stevenson

Studies, with electronic versions being available online two years

after their appearance in print. With this in mind, we continue

to discuss the possibility of doing without a print edition and the

editors would welcome emails on whether you feel the journal

would serve the Stevenson community effectively if it were to

become an entirely electronic publication.

The new RLS website site has been redeveloped under the ini-

tiative of Professor Linda Dryden of the Centre for Literature and

Writing (CLAW) at Edinburgh Napier University. The project

has the support of the Universities of Stirling and Edinburgh, of

literary trusts such as the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature

and the Writers’ Museum of Edinburgh, and has been made

possible by a generous project grant from the Carnegie Trust.

Dr Hilary Grimes is the research assistant for the project and

Callum Egan is the web designer. Professor Richard Dury is fully

collaborating on the changeover and Professor David Benyon is

offering his expertise on matters of design and usability.

New features of the site include pages devoted to each of

Stevenson’s texts, including plot synopses, downloadable full

texts with page-turner facilities, and information about their

publication and reception. Also included are biographical pages

on Stevenson, and information on family, friends, and major

authors who influenced him. Other pages will outline information

about locations to visit for those wishing to follow in Stevenson’s

footsteps and links to tourist information. Details of RLS muse-

ums and libraries with significant Stevenson collections, links

to useful Stevenson sites, and lists of bibliographies with brief

synopses of critical works will also be available. Furthermore, the

site will provide bibliographies listing the film, television, radio,

play and other adaptations of Stevenson’s works. The site also

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3Journal of Stevenson Studies

contains a wealth of visual images associated with Stevenson,

including unique material from the photograph albums the

Stevenson family kept in Samoa, many of which have never been

seen by the general public before. A Schools section will contain

information and resources for school students, with reading

packs from the City of Literature and a recommended reading

list for young scholars. An RLS Community section will offer

information about Stevenson societies throughout the world, the

RLS Newsletter, and a forum where enthusiasts can discuss and

contribute to Stevenson scholarship.

The academic community’s engagement with Stevenson’s

writing continues to flourish as evidenced in the fully critical

focus of the articles that follow, written by scholars operating

from New York, Milan, Minnesota, Bordeaux, Boston, Tahiti,

Bari, Bochum, London and Rome. The international dimension

speaks for itself.

Linda Dryden, Richard Dury and Roderick Watson

Acknowledgements

The Journal of Stevenson Studies thanks Waverley Books,

Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy as well as Self Made Hero (Eye

Classics), Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal for permis-

sion to reproduce pages from their graphic realisations of Dr

Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

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5Kaiser

Mapping Stevenson’s rhetorics of play

Matthew Kaiser

In December 1873, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sidney Colvin

travelled to Monte Carlo in search of fun, a temporary distraction

from their assorted health problems. Their holiday came to an

abrupt end, however, when a man shot himself in the head at the

gaming table in front of Colvin, having staked all his money and

lost. Shaken, Stevenson and Colvin departed Monaco ahead of

schedule, the Casino’s aleatory ethos flecked, in their eyes, with

blood.1 The incident haunted Stevenson for a decade. Eventually,

it found creative outlet in his triptych ‘The Suicide Club’ in New

Arabian Nights (1882), which depicts – in a manner both absurd

and macabre – a group of suicidal men engaged in a ritualistic

game of chance, the winner of which receives a coveted death

sentence. For good reason, Stevenson’s writings are entangled

in the minds of many readers with the concept of play. As

Robert Crawford has recently argued, the logic of play is central

to Stevenson’s aesthetic of adventure and his sense of self, the

seeds of which were planted, Crawford suggests, when Stevenson

‘play[ed] truant as a teenage student in the open streets of

Edinburgh’.2 Throughout his career, Stevenson extolled – in his

poetry, essays, and his novels for boys – the imaginative and

ethical power of child play. One pictures him hunched over his

map of Treasure Island with his stepson and ‘playmate’ Lloyd

Osbourne, windowpanes streaked with rain, streams and har-

bours trickling from his pen.3 Stevenson cultivated an infectious

air of idleness: a ‘revolutionary’ resistance, as Stephen Arata puts

it, to middle-class industriousness.4 In his early Bohemian writ-

ings especially, Stevenson surveys the world from a promontory

of irony. From his canoe in Belgium, from his toy cabin above

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Calistoga, beside his asinine companion, Modestine, in moun-

tainous France, Stevenson imposes upon a rugged topography a

mischievous grid. Whether he plays alpinist, adventurer, or emi-

grant, he is cosmopolitan flâneur: languorous consumer of an

amusing and charming world. As the grisly incident in Monaco

reminds us, however, for all his lightheartedness, Stevenson had

a sober respect for the dark contours of play, for its inharmoni-

ous and potentially tragic dimensions. He understood that play

is not intrinsically liberatory, utopian, or for that matter happy.

In truth, Stevenson detected in play something profoundly

unsettling. He saw deep fissures beneath its mirth. That night in

Monte Carlo, he saw death.

Because play is such a protean concept in Western culture, it

is particularly prone to mystification, vulnerable to ideology. It

is easy to overlook the contradictions that structure it. To his

credit, Stevenson never did. He repeatedly and insistently draws

his reader’s attention to them. He lowers himself cautiously into

play’s bottomless caverns. He notes its pitfalls, the jagged edges,

its shifting terrain. In the pages that follow, I intend to bring into

relief some of these contradictions, to explore the unsettled nature

of the concept of play in Stevenson’s writings. For Stevenson,

play captures and communicates the bewildering experience of

modernity: the quintessentially Victorian sensation of a world in

play. A world in play is not the same thing, of course, as a world

at play, which is how the Victorians depicted that apocryphal age

known as Merry England, a time when the omnipresence of play

was still satisfying, its expression enchanting. A world in play

means two things. First, it means a world in flux: an inconstant

condition, perpetual variation and unrest. But it also means a

world that throws itself headlong into play, where it constructs a

parallel universe, which displaces that world. The membranes of

play stretch to the point where they encircle all of existence, leav-

ing nothing outside. Play becomes the condition of modern life.

The world is reduced to the size of a game. Stevenson explores

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7Kaiser

the world inside play, locates modernity in the interstices of play:

its frictional spaces, its jumbled folds. Stevenson demystifies play

from within play. Like Dickens, Wilde, and other Victorian writ-

ers, Stevenson made play central to his life’s work not because

he viewed it nostalgically or idealistically as a cure for modern

ills, but because he intuited the extent to which the world as we

know it, our experience of modernity, is always-already in play.

His playfulness is pragmatic, adaptive. The ‘lesson of the world’,

Stevenson declares in Virginibus Puerisque (1881), is ‘that dolls

are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings’.5 One

must make the most of a world stuffed with sawdust. Rather than

blindly embrace play, Stevenson searches gingerly for a foothold,

a place to call home, in a slippery and imperfect concept from

which no exit appears.

What follows is a map – a necessarily provisional map – of

Stevensonian play, with its moving parts, its labyrinthine turns.

My cartographical effort is inspired by veteran play theorist

Brian Sutton-Smith, who recently brought a bit of cohesion to

the fractious field of play studies – which attracts anthropolo-

gists, literary critics, philosophers, folklorists, primatologists,

and psychologists among others – by identifying seven rhetorics

of play that currently operate, often at cross-purposes, within

this interdisciplinary field.6 All seven of Sutton-Smith’s academic

rhetorics of play have correspondent precursors, not only in

Stevenson’s own rhetorics of play, but more generally in the quo-

tidian discourses that delineate and structure nineteenth-century

Western experience: from the ethic of competition that pervades

the middle-class worldview, through the perceived therapeutic

potential of recreational activities, to the political efficacy of

festivals and holidays in the promotion of national identity. The

rhetorical dissonance that marks play studies today is a rarefied

echo, in my view, of nineteenth-century popular debates about

the meaning and value of play as a central component of human

experience. When it comes to the subject of play, Stevenson is

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one of the more rhetorically profligate Victorian writers, regu-

larly invoking all seven rhetorics, sometimes within the same

text. Rather than specific types of play, the rhetorics that follow

– some of which I’ve taken the liberty of renaming – should be

understood as constellations of cultural and ideological assump-

tions about the function and value of play.

Play as competition

To play means to contest. Life is a rule-bound game – ‘this game

of life’, as Stevenson terms it – in which contestants compete

meritocratically for rewards, prestige, and authority.7 Rather

than cooperative or autotelic, the will to play constitutes an

impulse – a masculine one in Stevenson’s eyes – to be the best,

to gain power over oneself, over others, over one’s environment.

To the young man on the threshold of adulthood, the ‘world

appears’, Stevenson suggests, ‘a brave gymnasium, full of sea-

bathing, and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues’.8 Sports,

athleticism, duels, agonistic tensions between men produce order

and hence justice, simultaneously unleashing and sublimating

violence. Like many Victorians, Stevenson, whose childhood love

of pirate and war games is well documented, is both attracted

to and repelled by this particular logic of play.9 If villains are

motivated by a desire to crush their opponents, so too are the

heroes who defeat them. Competition is the disease from which

modern life suffers; competition is the only possible cure. Hence,

Jekyll characterises his moral and intellectual struggle against

Hyde as ‘gymnastics’.10 Like Darwin, Stevenson envisions the

natural world – a beach, an island, a boulder-strewn mountain-

side – as an arena in which men play a deadly game of survival.

The ancient Greeks might have detected airy nymphs stirring in

the branches of trees, but Stevenson senses the spirit of com-

petition blustering behind every bend. Describing his laborious

ascent of Mount Saint Helena in The Silverado Squatters (1884),

Stevenson recalls ‘the athletic opposition of the wind’, a tree fall-

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9Kaiser

ing in apparent premeditation, ‘blocking the road’.11

Stevenson is ambivalent about the efficacy of rules. Comparing

literature in his essay on style to sport, and style to the rules of

the game, Stevenson heaps praise upon the great literary ‘ath-

letes’ ‘Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson’, true masters

of the game.12 A wrestler of words, a successful writer must

exhibit a graceful ‘neatness’, avoid ‘meaningless’ or extraneous

movements.13 ‘[T]o fail in this’, Stevenson warns, ‘is to swindle in

the game’. And yet Stevenson insists just as fervently that obses-

sion with rules, a sportive worldview, constricts the life of the

mind and dehumanises players, winners as well as losers. Just

as that great ‘athlete’ Ruskin detected in competition the ‘vice of

jealousy’, implored his Victorian audience to look to their souls,

for ‘fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the

whole of this unendurably long mortal life’, so Stevenson recoils

at times from the middle-class ‘race for six-penny pieces’.14 ‘The

whole game of business is beggar my neighbour’, he concludes,

‘and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such

close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrin-

sically inhumane for that.’15 In his account of his Atlantic voyage

in The Amateur Emigrant (1895), Stevenson describes in vivid

detail the many games played by his fellow passengers ‘to beguile

the time’, to militate against restlessness and tedium, to govern

themselves.16 In addition to a ‘chess-board’, a ‘pack of cards’, and

‘dominoes’, ‘[w]e had a regular daily competition to guess the

vessel’s progress’. Beneath all order, however, lurks the threat

of violence. Eventually, Stevenson’s fellow passengers reduce

competition to its brutal essence, invent a new game, which the

author ‘refrain[s] from joining’: ‘The humour of the thing was to

box a person’s ears until he found out who had cuffed him.’

Play as self-creation

Rather than a contest with otherness, play is a self-directed

activity: the ‘art’, to quote Stevenson, ‘of living’, an act of self-

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cultivation, the optimization of self. (‘Idlers’, Virginibus, p. 56.)

His loneliest rhetoric of play, it smacks of bittersweetness. For

even when people play together, surrounded by company, they

play alone, inwardly. The ‘sulky’ narrator of ‘The Pavilion on the

Links’ (1882) presents himself as a spokesperson of sorts for this

ethos of play, having dedicated his life to ‘gipsying’, to ‘keep[ing]

aloof’, ‘suffic[ing] for [his] own entertainment’.17 More than work

or pain or religious devotion, play – in the form of leisure, hob-

bies, pastimes, idleness, recreational pursuits – opens a window

onto interiority, launches a voyage into self. Stevenson invokes

this rhetoric, alongside others, as an antidote to soul-crushing

competition, to a life lived always with one ‘eye on the medal’,

as he characterises commercial modernity in ‘An Apology for

Idlers’. (Virginibus, p. 57.) Idleness is the conscious avoidance

of contestation, a playful refusal to play the game: hence, it is

perceived as ‘an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.’

(Virginibus, p. 53.) Rather than ‘money-grubbing’, Stevenson

insists, ‘[t]here should be nothing so much a man’s business as

his amusements’.18 Whereas ambitious people exist in ‘a sort of

dead-alive’ state, mere shadows of ‘vitality’, idle people, steeped

in self-consciousness, sport a ‘catholic appetite and a strong

sense of personal identity.’ (‘Idlers’, Virginibus, p. 57.) Indeed,

in ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’ Stevenson claims that the true aim

of youth is not supremacy over others but preparation for ‘the

leisure of age’. (Virginibus, p. 47.) There is a danger attached,

however, to the modern hobby of selfhood, which is pursued

at the expense at times of community. For all his leisurely self-

cultivation, Stevenson understands that this particular vision

of play has its ethical limitations, contains a creeping, alienat-

ing narcissism. As Jekyll’s ‘secret pleasures’ remind us, mere

emphasis separates recreation from re-creation (Strange Case,

p. 55). Monstrosity lurks within the self-fashioning ethos of the

leisure class.

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11Kaiser

Play as subversion

Rather than a will to compete, or an autotelic impulse, play con-

stitutes a desire, essentially, to make mischief, to unleash foolish-

ness, profanity, and disorder. Play here becomes power’s Other,

a potentially frightening yet seductive urge to rebel. Personified

for Stevenson by tricksters, free spirits, cheats, drunks, bullies

and cads, by his carnivalesque anti-hero François Villon in

‘A Lodging for the Night’, play deflates high-mindedness and

undermines respectability. Facing the prospect of freezing to

death in the ‘frosty streets’ of medieval Paris, Villon cares less

about the ‘bottomless pit’ that awaits him than the lost opportu-

nity for ‘disorderly amusement’ that death represents.19 Mischief

undermines the orderliness necessary for healthy competition. It

brings industry to a halt. Whereas the idle man refuses to play the

game, the mischievous man (or child) actively subverts the game.

Nervously eyeing the banks of the Sambre River, which ‘turned

so industriously to and fro among his little hills’, Stevenson,

in An Inland Voyage (1878), warns his canoeing companion,

Walter Simpson, ‘that boys were the most dangerous creatures;

and if once you began with them, it was safe to end in a shower of

stones.’20 Hyde, too, who devotes his life to extralegal pleasures,

to ‘foul play’, epitomises this vision of play as subversive (Strange

Case, p. 33). Utterson counters the slippery Hyde by invoking the

rhetoric of play as competition, an ethic of fair play, threatening

to subject the ugly man-child to a game of hide-and-seek: ‘“If he

be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”’ (Strange

Case, p. 15.) Here Stevenson conceives of the tension between

reality principle and pleasure principle as ludic, a clash between

divergent play impulses: a reactive submission to rules and an

unquenchable thirst to break them. Stevenson associates the lat-

ter sensation with Dionysian transformation, inebriation. Hence,

‘like wine’, the ‘potion’ that produces Hyde triggers in Jekyll an

‘incredibly sweet’ and ‘heady recklessness’. (Strange Case, p.

50.) Naughty schoolboy meets oenological Hyde in California, in

Stevenson6.indb 11 23/10/2009 19:25


Stevenson’s mischievous homage in The Silverado Squatters to

Napa Valley wine: ‘I am interested in all wines, and have been all

my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept secreted in

his play-box up to my last discovery, those notable Valtellines,

that once shone upon the board of Caesar.’21

Play as paideia

At its core is the sentimental notion, a truism today, that play is

intrinsically productive and normative, that children and young

animals learn, adapt, and develop through their play. Victorian

proponents of this rhetoric viewed child play as an expression

of futurity: a preparatory drive to acquire physical and cognitive

skills. Nineteenth-century play theorist Alexander Chamberlain,

for instance, even suggests at one point that the invisible hand of

the Protestant work ethic directs the playing child, who is ‘pre-

paring day by day to take part in the real work of life which the

coming years will bring’.22 In his essay ‘Child’s Play’, Stevenson

repeatedly invokes this functionalist theory of play, claiming that

boys ‘anticipate’ the ‘business man’s pleasure in method’ – and

that girls ‘rehearse’ ‘the love of mothers’ – ‘in their play hours.’

(Virginibus, p. 111.) Child play is essentially world-producing: ‘In

the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in all.’ (Virginibus,

p. 112.) If every child is like Robinson Crusoe, building civiliza-

tion from scratch, inhabiting his own ludic island, then Crusoe

is ‘popular with youth’ precisely because he is childlike: ‘Crusoe

was always at makeshifts, and had, in so many words, to play at

a great variety of professions; and then the book is all about tools,

and there is nothing that delights a child so much.’ (Virginibus,

p. 110.) Here the will to play is synonymous with the instinct to

survive, the march toward modernity. In The Amateur Emigrant,

Stevenson marvels at the newness of the United States, at the

enormity of the challenge the young nation faces in preparing

itself for the future. He invokes the rhetoric of play as paideia:

‘it seems incredible’, he muses, ‘that life can go on with so few

Stevenson6.indb 12 23/10/2009 19:25

13Kaiser

properties, or the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare

a play-room.’23

What makes this rhetoric so ideologically potent is that it

masks its own normalizing violence. Naturalizing socialization,

it presents the impetus to conform as its opposite: a spontane-

ous, autonomous, happy impulse within the child. Proponents

of this rhetoric – including Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of

Kindergarten – often metaphorise child play as a fruitful yet

well-pruned garden: a central trope, of course, in Stevenson’s

children’s poetry.24 Consider, for instance, the opening stanza of

Stevenson’s ‘The Unseen Playmate’ (1885):

When children are playing alone on the green,

In comes the playmate that never was seen.

When children are happy and lonely and good,

The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.25

It is a peculiar image. Solitude serves as ‘playmate’; loneliness is

‘friend’. If productive and ‘good,’ the solitary child soon discovers

that he or she has the capacity to create a small society, which

emerges simultaneously from the child’s interiority and from the

organic world around the child, from ‘the green’ and ‘the wood.’

Stevenson naturalises the socializing power of autonomous child

play. The preparatory aspect of child play, its future trajectory,

is even more apparent in his poem ‘Looking Forward’ (1885), in

which the brutality of capitalist competition is both anticipated

and diluted by the innocuous logic of play:

When I am grown to man’s estate

I shall be very proud and great.

And tell the other girls and boys

Not to meddle with my toys.26

Play as imaginary

The rhetoric most cherished by those of us who work in literary

studies, it fuels the liberatory claims – the assertions of theoreti-

Stevenson6.indb 13 23/10/2009 19:25


cal or epistemological subversion – that we sometimes make on

behalf of the concept of play. Stevenson invokes this Romantic

rhetoric when he credits play with being the spur of thought, its

fluctuating essence: that quality of literary language that makes it

enchanting. Somewhat paradoxically, play becomes an assertion

of creative agency, on the one hand, and an intuitive surrender, on

the other, to the inexorable motion of the imagination. Stevenson

locates the source of his literary impulse in his boyhood ability ‘to

make a plaything of imaginary series of events’; play is an act of

imaginative submission, ‘laying [one’s] head in the grass, staring

into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with

fairy armies.’27 Literature draws us inexorably into a ludic world:

microcosmic yet endless. It sweeps us into our minds. From his

canoe on the Oise, Stevenson ‘love[s]’ ‘to kiss [his] hand or wave

[his] handkerchief to people [he] shall never see again, to play

with possibility’, linking himself imaginatively, like an author, to

strangers, whose futures unfold in his mind.28

Ubiquitous in Stevenson’s writings, the logic of ludic enchant-

ment clashes with and tempers his other play rhetorics, in par-

ticular the logics of competition, subversion, and paideia. We’ve

already observed how Stevenson invokes the rhetoric of play as

subversion to describe California wine as a ‘playful’ ‘American

cocktail.’29 He invokes the rhetoric of play as imaginary, how-

ever, to describe the craftsmanship of wine-makers: ‘the wine’,

he insists, ‘is bottled poetry’.30 Wine tickles the imagination,

then, as much as it threatens to roil polite society. Occasionally,

Stevenson’s attempts to suture together divergent rhetorics

prove less graceful. Struggling to reconcile contradictory play

logics, Stevenson characterises child play not only as an industri-

ous expression of futurity, as we’ve seen, but as an imaginative

escape from the adult world: an atavistic and ‘morally rebellious’

flight into ‘a mythological epoch’, into a parallel universe or

charming ‘cloudland’.31 Thus, children step backward and for-

ward at the same time, reaching for and simultaneously recoiling

Stevenson6.indb 14 23/10/2009 19:25

15Kaiser

from their futures. The playing child stands, Stevenson knows,

on shifting sands.

Play as identity

Here the idea is that people play in order to connect with other

people and experience a primal, intersubjective sense of belong-

ing. ‘[W]hat religion knits people so closely’, Stevenson muses in

An Inland Voyage, ‘as a common sport?’32 This rhetoric under-

lies the socially cohesive logic of holiday, feast, public spectacle,

and all forms of customary revelry. Though shrill at times in the

nineteenth century, this decidedly antimodern rhetoric is usu-

ally accompanied by a twinge of nostalgia. When Alan Breck, for

instance, loses his money in a card game to fellow Highlander,

Cluny, in Kidnapped (1886), the victorious Cluny returns the

money good-naturedly, insisting that ‘it was all daffing’, that the

game was ‘all nonsense’, invoking the communitarian ethic of

Merry Scotland.33 Here the rhetoric of play as identity overrides

middle-class competition, producing a politically potent but

nonetheless ludic Scottish bond. Stevenson presents identifica-

tory play as a moral and psychological corrective to the antisocial

and potentially stultifying experience of modern selfhood. In

The Amateur Emigrant, for instance, he describes the complex

psychology of ship society: ‘The children, I observed, were all in

a band, and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders were

still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the outskirts of acquaint-

ance.’34 The children’s ludic sociality smacks of primitivism: ‘The

sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as familiar as home to

these half-conscious little ones.’ Children see the world through

the lens of holiday. As a result, they have relatively porous sub-

jectivities. Travel has a tendency to trigger this intersubjective,

indeed, generous sensation in Stevenson himself, rekindling the

ludic expansiveness of his childhood. Hence, Calistoga has ‘an

atmosphere of holiday.’35 Nothing spells ‘the death of all holiday

feeling’, however, as ‘the receipt of letters’ ‘on a journey’, the

Stevenson6.indb 15 23/10/2009 19:25


‘tug’ of professional responsibility, which makes one ‘feel’ like ‘a

tethered bird.’36

Toward the end of his life, in its final South Pacific chapter,

Stevenson is drawn quite powerfully to this rhetoric, envision-

ing narrative art not so much as an expression of an individual

imagination but as a ludic spur of communitarian consciousness.

Watching the ‘holiday’ festivities on the Gilbert Islands in 1889,

where the locals gather ‘like children’ ‘about a circus’, Stevenson

is ‘moved’ at one point by the ‘elaborate’ intertwining motions

of Polynesian dancers, who tell ancient stories with their ges-

tures, transporting the spectator out of himself, ‘lead[ing] on the

mind’.37 The customary dance – which ‘thrills’ and ‘subjugates’ –

‘has the essence of all art, an unexplored imminent significance.’

Stevenson, however, knows that he can never achieve Polynesian

identity. Like an anthropologist or tourist, he plays at being

Polynesian.

Play as fate

Rather than something we do, play is something that happens

to us. We are the playthings of the cosmos, the pawns of God,

of fortune, of ineffable forces beyond our powers of comprehen-

sion. Play humbles us. An exhilarating or horrifying sensation, it

reminds us of just how flimsy our knowledge and authority are in

the grand scheme of things. In ‘Æs Triplex’, Stevenson tells us a

chilling story about how ‘the deified Caligula’ ‘encouraged a vast

concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiæ bay; and

when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose

the Prætorian guards’, and had the revellers ‘tossed into the sea’

for his own amusement. (Virginibus, p. 77.) Divine caprice, the

play of fate, proves more powerful in the end than the strong-

est bonds of revelry, intersubjective play. God laughs and ‘man

and his merrymaking’ ‘tumble’ ‘in the dust.’ (Virginibus, p. 76.)

The forces of cosmic caprice intoxicate Stevenson and make

him slightly queasy, attracting and repelling him. We see his

Stevenson6.indb 16 23/10/2009 19:25

17Kaiser

uneasiness in his depictions of gambling: in the deadly game of

chance, for instance, at the centre of ‘The Suicide Club’. With all

the attractions of the ‘Roman amphitheatre’, the suicide game

unmans even powerful Prince Florizel, who surrenders himself

and hence his ‘brave and loyal country’ to the vicissitudes of

chance, experiencing ‘a certain joy’ even ‘in his alarms’, as he

‘gamble[s] away his future’.38 Having chosen the fatal card, the

ace of spades, which condemns him to death, a defiant Florizel

struggles agonistically against fate, attempts to override one

play logic with another by challenging the club’s president to a

duel, a contest of honour. Like a mountain climber or a skydiver,

the Stevensonian adventurer teeters on the vertiginous cusp

of chance, ‘reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and

cheerfully hazarded,’ attempts through acts of daring to outplay

death.39 Eluding death – etymologically speaking, outplaying

it – is possible, Stevenson insists, only when one stares unwa-

veringly into the ludic depths of the cosmos. In ‘Forest Notes’

(1876), for instance, Stevenson relates the story of an ‘old stag’

‘captured’ in ‘the woods of France’ by a young Charles the Sixth.40

On its hoary neck, the prince discovered a bronze collar engraved

with the markings of a bygone Caesar. He ‘stood aghast’. If the

‘solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag’ for centuries,

Stevenson ponders, ‘might not you also play hide-and-seek, in

these groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man’s life,

and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of

human years?’

We see the rhetoric of play as fate manifested on a more aca-

demic level in the nineteenth century in the flurry of interest in

Heraclitus among classicists and philologists, who embraced the

pre-Socratic notion of ludic flux that makes of time – to quote

Heraclitus – ‘a game’ of creation and destruction ‘played beau-

tifully | by children.’41 Stevenson, too, on occasion, associates

child play with the ability of the cosmos to sweep us away. In An

Inland Voyage, he watches children who live with their families

Stevenson6.indb 17 23/10/2009 19:25


on canal boats play together in their ‘impromptu hamlet’, their

rustic flotilla, just hours before the ‘four winds’ scatter the boats

– and hence the playfellows – ‘into all parts of France’.42 Here

child play reminds us of the fleetingness of life. In the end, we

are objects of play, not agents. Tossed to and fro on the ‘moving

desert of seas’, Stevenson invokes in The Amateur Emigrant

the rhetoric of play as fate, meditating upon this ‘unfathomable

ocean’, ‘this waste’: ‘a playground for the stormy petrel’, at home

on the ‘seas of space’.43 Likewise, nature makes a toy of man.

An unseen hand puts our lives in play, sends us tumbling into

the abyss. Awakening one morning to the sublime monotony

of Nebraska’s endless plains outside the window of his rattling

train, Stevenson is overwhelmed by ‘this infinity’: ‘an empty sky,

an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from

horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either

hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.’44

In his bones, Stevenson knows that humankind – for all its self-

congratulation – is behind the eight ball, as his American friends

might say. And so, in a casino in Monte Carlo, a man shoots

himself.

Stevenson discovers an entire world in play, tangled in its

contradictory logics. That world is the world, the experience of

modern life. Nothing – not suffering or work, not death itself –

is intrinsically external to the phenomenon of play: a concept

Stevenson describes in startlingly totalizing terms. Seven rhetor-

ics of play: seven floor-to-ceiling mirrors – some cracked, some

cloudy, some framed in gold – in a heptagonal room of intricate

design. At the centre of this playspace, claustrophobic yet infinite,

modernity stands transfixed, its glimpses catching glimpses of

glimpses. If you prefer a number other than seven, add another

wall, or three, or twenty. The structure is modular; the effect is

the same. What is important to understand is that play triggers

in Stevenson existential anxiety: endless unsettling reflections

upon the condition of modern life. Thus, when Utterson and

Stevenson6.indb 18 23/10/2009 19:25

19Kaiser

Poole invade Jekyll’s private ‘cabinet’, the emblem of modern

subjectivity upon which they stumble is a ‘cheval glass, into whose

depths they looked with an involuntary horror’.45 They see in the

mirror ‘the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a

hundred repetitions’, ‘their own pale and fearful countenances’.

We must map these labyrinthine reflections.

The tension lies not between play and unplay, but within

play, in the clash of its disparate logics. Play pulls children, for

instance, in divergent directions: toward the productive futures

for which they mimetically prepare and toward a primordial

state of imaginative escape. In ‘The Suicide Club’, modern man,

too, finds himself torn ludically between sheer luck, on the one

hand, and his own sportive limberness, on the other, between a

suicidal game of chance and a life-affirming contest of honour.

What is adventure, in the end, but the intensification of the fric-

tion between chance and competition: the irrepressible urge to

outplay the cosmos? Stevenson also situates art and literature

on a ludic fault line: between the rule-boundness of form and

the mischievous undecidability of language. A peripheral figure,

such as Villon or the itinerant musicians in ‘Providence and the

Guitar’, the Stevensonian artist feels simultaneously the lure of

convention and the lure of the open road. Stevenson skilfully

navigates among play rhetorics. At times, we catch him building

bridges, acting as peacemaker, or referee. At times, he pits play

against play. Or he rescues play from play in the name of play. Or

he lauds a particular logic of play in one text that he excoriates

in another. His views on play are themselves in play. In truth, we

have just begun to explore this world of his. I present this crude

and provisional map in the spirit of exploration.

Stevenson6.indb 19 23/10/2009 19:25


Notes

For a more detailed and expansive account of Brian Sutton-

Smith’s rhetorical approach to the study of play and how it

applies to the broad context of Victorian studies, see my essay

in the recent special issue of New Literary History devoted to

play, edited by Herbert Tucker: “The World in Play: A Portrait

of a Victorian Concept,” in NLH 40 (Winter 2009): 105-129. My

reading of Stevenson draws upon the paradigm articulated in

that essay.1 Stevenson describes the incident briefly in a letter to his cousin Robert

dated 4 January 1874. See Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 1997), p. 70.

2 Robert Crawford, Scotland’s Books (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 492.

3 Crawford, p. 496.

4 Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson, Morris, and the Value of Idleness,’ in Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, ed. by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 6.

5 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Virginibus Puerisque II’, in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (New York: Elibron, 2006), p. 23.

6 See Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

7 ‘Virginibus Puerisque II’, in Virginibus Puerisque, p. 18, henceforth cited in the text.

8 ‘Dedication’, in Virginibus Puerisque, p. 5.

9 Crawford, p. 496.

10 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. by Katherine Linehan (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 60, henceforth cited in the text.

11 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (Northridge, CA: Aegypan Press, 2005), pp. 36-37.

12 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Morality of the Profession of Letters’, in The Art of Writing (McLean, VA: IndyPublish, 2001), p. 39.

13 ‘On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature’, in The Art of

Stevenson6.indb 20 23/10/2009 19:25

21Kaiser

Writing, pp. 7-8.

14 John Ruskin, ‘Traffic,’ in Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 237; Stevenson, ‘An Apology for Idlers’, in Virginibus Puerisque, p. 53.

15 The Silverado Squatters, p. 48.

16 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant, ed. by Christopher MacLachlan (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 122.

17 The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Barry Menikoff (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), p. 137.

18 Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage (Northridge, CA: Aegypan Press, 2005), p. 19.

19 The Complete Stories, p. 194.

20 An Inland Voyage, p. 27.


22 Alexander Francis Chamberlain, The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man (London: Walter Scott, 1900), p. 25.

23 The Amateur Emigrant, p. 210.

24 See Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man, trans. by W. N. Hailmann (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005).

25 Robert Louis Stevenson, Selected Poems, ed. by Angus Calder (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 87.

26 Selected Poems, p. 69.

27 ‘My First Book’, The Art of Writing, pp. 79, 83.




31 ‘Child’s Play’, Virginibus Puerisque, pp. 114-15.


33 Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (Toronto: Bantam, 1982), p. 164.




37 Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, ed. by Neil Rennie

Stevenson6.indb 21 23/10/2009 19:25


(London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 189-91.

38 The Complete Stories, pp. 20, 25.

39 ‘Æs Triplex’, Virginibus Puerisque, p. 80.

40 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Forest Notes’, in Further Memories Tusitala Edition (London: Heinemann, 1924), XXX, p. 139-40.

41 Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. by Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 51.




45 Strange Case, p. 40.

Stevenson6.indb 22 23/10/2009 19:25

23Jaëck

To jump or not to jump: Stevenson’s kidnapping of adventure

Nathalie Jaëck

‘Here,’ he would say, ‘here’s a dub for ye to jump, my

Whiggie! I ken you’re a fine jumper!’

– Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ch. 24

Kidnapped, published in the same year as The Strange Case of

Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, explores the same fundamental

inner duality as Stevenson’s mythical story: Alan Breck versus

David Balfour, or the Highlands versus the Lowlands, Jacobites

versus Whig Hanoverians, the dying feudal clan structure ver-

sus the modern industrialised kingdom – the two conflicting

and intertwined impulses of Scotland’s identity, in a time of

historical mutation.1 Yet David and Alan unexpectedly but com-

pellingly present the reader with quite another type of duality:

while romantic and courageous Alan is a dashing, indeed a heroic

jumper, David, the unassuming first-person narrator, consist-

ently cuts a rather poor figure when it comes to actual jumping,

to the point that in times of quarrels, his clumsy jumps become

an explicit and ironic bone of contention between the two friends.

Jumps can be marked as classical topoi of adventure stories,

they constitute incidental moments of intensity, decisive moves

and crucial episodes, they typically signal the beginning of

adventure, accelerate the rhythm and concentrate the action,

as much as they conjure up the necessary jubilatory ingredients

of danger, imminence and disruption – pirates boarding ships,

prisoners escaping, young girls eloping. Stevenson’s adventure

novels do not disprove the rule, and stage quite a number of

Stevenson6.indb 23 23/10/2009 19:25


spectacular jumps and leaps, so much so that the recurrence of

the motif might help build an index of closeness to the adventure

genre: fourteen occurrences of ‘leap’ in Kidnapped, eighteen

occurrences in The Dynamiter, no fewer than thirty-one occur-

rences in Catriona – to be read against Jim Hawkins’s staunch

and symptomatic refusal to jump in Treasure Island, despite the

doctor’s eager solicitations:

‘Jim,’ the doctor interrupted, and his voice was quite

changed, ‘Jim, I can’t have this. Whip over, and we’ll run

for it.’

‘Doctor,’ said I, ‘I passed my word.’

‘I know, I know,’ he cried. ‘We can’t help that, Jim, now.

I’ll take it on my shoulders, holus bolus, blame and shame,

my boy; but stay here, I cannot let you. Jump! One jump,

and you’re out, and we’ll run for it like antelopes.’

‘No,’ I replied; ‘you know right well you wouldn’t do the

thing yourself – neither you nor squire nor captain; and

no more will I’ (ch. 30)

In Kidnapped, Stevenson explicitly highlights, questions and

transposes the usually taken-for-granted motif of the jump, and

such mutation in the treatment of the jump exemplifies the muta-

tion of the adventure novel at the turn of the century: Stevenson

delineates the jump as a crucial and paradoxical theoretical

space, as a formal tool to illustrate the modernity of the adven-

ture novel, as a necessary break of continuity, as an opportunity

to stray from Zola’s linear compactness and question French

naturalism, and as a dynamic incentive to stimulate the mutation

of the adventure novel that Stevenson argued for– thus seduc-

ing the French critics of the NRF into taking the audacious and

Stevenson6.indb 24 23/10/2009 19:25

25Jaëck

unexpected leap for adventure, to desert naturalism and elect

British adventure writers in general and Stevenson in particular

as desirable lines of literary escape.

There are indeed two very distinct types of jump in Kidnapped.

On the one hand Alan, as a character, dutifully takes the con-

ventional spectacular leaps in order to gratify the aficionados of

Adventure, and thus takes the novel along the incidental and dis-

ruptive course that Stevenson favoured. On the other hand, I will

argue that David’s fragmented little bounces and unassuming

half-jumps are not so deficient after all, and read as subversive

attempts to displace, to deconstruct the genre: they trigger an

essential literary mutation as it was best expressed by Jacques

Rivière, followed by the whole of the NRF: ‘L’aventure, c’est la

forme de l’œuvre plutôt que sa matière’.2 As he hesitates right

in the middle of his jumps, he forces the reader to pause and

focus on the formal use of the jump, to consider it not only as a

necessary ingredient of Adventure, as contractual content, but

as a dynamic form the structural characteristics of which can be

imported in the form of the novel itself. It is above all as a nar-

rator that David marks the jump as a crucial, problematic space:

importing the jump as a form, as a break of continuity, he fol-

lows Jim’s example and comes up with a narration that favours

gaps, imminence, fragmentation, perpetual advent. Stuck in the

middle of the river, ‘upon the middle rock’ – ‘So there we stood,

side by side upon a small rock slippery with spray, a far broader

leap in front of us’3 – adequately defining himself as ‘betwixt

and between’ (p. 60), David does not refer to his political prefer-

ence only, and does not only situate himself in the line of Scott’s

Waverleyian heroes: it is as one of Stevenson’s first-person nar-

rators that he elects the Middle as a favourite dynamic space of

literary innovation,4 certainly in between Whigs and Jacobites,

but above all in between naturalism and modernism, in a neutral

intensive opening, right in the middle of a jump from one liter-

ary system to another. David’s physical misgivings thus contrast

Stevenson6.indb 25 23/10/2009 19:25


with his being a very bold narrative jumper: he forces the readers

to mind the gap, to explore it as an open space, as a tool for liter-

ary mutation.

To jump or not to jump: Alan versus David.

Alan is unquestionably characterised by his striking heroic

jumps in Kidnapped – no fewer than three decisive and highly

dangerous leaps, that in turn condition the course of the story.

Unanticipated, totally heterogeneous, he enters in the middle of

nowhere, and literally boards the story with a dashing jump. His

thoroughly unexpected irruption on the Covenant jumpstarts a

new track of adventure for David: his particularly intense jump-

ing feat accelerates the story, he intervenes as a radical, as an

emphatic incident,5 as the essentially adventurous advent of

the unexpected, illustrating Rivière’s definition of adventure:

‘L’aventure c’est ce qui advient, c’est-à-dire ce qui s’ajoute, ce qui

arrive par-dessus le marché, ce qu’on n’attendait pas. Un roman

d’aventure c’est le récit d’événements qui ne sont pas contenus

les uns dans les autres’.6 Whereas the collision proves deadly for

the rest of the crew, Alan alone survives, thanks to a particularly

intense jumping feat, and changes David’s fate:

At the moment of the blow, the stern had been thrown

into the air, and the man (having his hands free, and for

all he was encumbered with a frieze overcoat that came

below his knees) had leaped up and caught hold of the

brig’s bowsprit. (p. 56)

During their flight in the heather, Alan once more pumps

adrenaline in the story and defies death through a particularly

hazardous double jump:

Alan looked neither to the right nor to the left, but jumped

clean upon the middle rock and fell there on his hands

Stevenson6.indb 26 23/10/2009 19:25

27Jaëck

and knees to check himself, for that rock was small and

he might have pitched over on the far side. [. . .] Then,

putting his hands to his mouth and his mouth to my ear,

he shouted ‘Hang or drown!’ and turning his back upon

me, leaped over the farther branch of the stream, and

landed safe. (p. 137; italics added)

Finally, as the soldiers are close on their heels and threaten to

catch up with them, Alan once more saves the day and jumps up

a rock to provide them both with a safe shelter:

It was only at the third trial, and then by standing on my

shoulders and leaping up with such force as I thought

must have broken my collar-bone, that he secured a

lodgement. (p. 138)

Alan thus intervenes in the story as a pure, autonomous event,

as an improbable, random disruption, as ‘a talisman against the

naturalist credo’.7 He embodies Stevenson’s desire to break the

causal linearity of naturalist narration: as a ‘brute incident’, he

jumps lines of escape by diverting the smooth, planned course of

the story, he himself generates a narrative jump, an unbridgeable

gap, an interruption of continuity. In an article on Zola, James

expressed the same desire as Stevenson to make narration less

determined, less necessary and continuous than the naturalists

had striven to build it: ‘Vérité marks the rigid straightness of his

course from point to point. He had seen his horizon and his fixed

goal from the first, and no cross-scent, no new distance, no blue

gap in the hill to right or to left ever tempted him to stray’ (James,

p. 405). Alan intervenes in the narration precisely as a perpetual

cross-scent, as a series of ‘gaps in the hill’, impeding the course

of the narration, placing the story in an unstable state of constant

happening, replacing causality by chance, and construction by

circumstance. He brilliantly materialises the reason why the

Stevenson6.indb 27 23/10/2009 19:25


French literary critics, converted by Marcel Schwob’s introduc-

tion of Stevenson in France,8 opted for adventure: ‘owing to

realism and human logic, the French writers have exiled the

unexpected from the novel, and yet most of life is unexpected

[. . .]. Defoë, Fielding, Dickens, Stevenson had a passion for

adventure: they bathed their characters in it, as in a vividly col-

oured reagent’.9 Alan definitely is one of those incidental charac-

ters that helped unsettle and derail the naturalist machinery: his

jumps efficiently break up and dissolve narrative linearity, and

explicitly mark out Stevenson’s groundbreaking and dissident

choice of a discontinuous, random progression of the text.

David is another, more complicated story: he visibly does not

quite measure up to Alan in terms of actual jumping, as the latter

is rather too prompt to underline, thus explicitly calling atten-

tion to the jump as a noteworthy space of discussion: ‘“Ye’re not

very gleg at the jumping,” said he’ (p. 138), or even as a bone

of contention: ‘“Here,” he would say, “here’s a dub for ye to

jump, my Whiggie! I ken you’re a fine jumper!”’(p. 172). Indeed,

whereas Alan steadily leaps up, jumps clean upon, leaps over,

David’s jumps all seem to dysfunction, and to fall short of the

required level of excitement in adventure novels. As contrasted

with Alan’s active bound onto the ship, David’s jump out of the

wrecked Covenant amounts rather to a passive fall: ‘at the sud-

den tilting of the ship I was cast clean over the bulwarks into the

sea’ (p. 89), and a passive verb is once more resorted to when

David finally lands on the island: ‘I was cast upon a little, bar-

ren isle, and cut off on every side by the salt sea’ (p. 92). Later,

when it is time to leave the islet, the rescue is everything but

spectacular, the escape far from adventurous: when the laugh-

ing fishermen eventually manage to make him understand that

Earraid is not much of an island after all, and that the low tide

allows him to wade across ‘a little trickle of water’ (p. 89), David

pathetically hops back to his starting point, and his diminutive

backward bounces heavily contrast with Alan’s ample forward

Stevenson6.indb 28 23/10/2009 19:25

29Jaëck

bounds: ‘At that I turned tail upon their boat (where my adviser

had once more begun to tee-hee with laughter) leaped back the

way I had come, from one stone to another’ (p. 98). Finally, the

crucial episode of the river jump leaves David stranded on a rock,

in the middle of the river, in a suspended half-jump. The first

half of the jump is a kind of mechanical, reflex bound on the part

of David, who instinctively follows Alan’s impetus: ‘I had scarce

time to measure the distance or to understand the peril, before

I had followed him, and he had caught and stopped me’ (p.137).

Nevertheless, whereas Alan, after a drink of brandy, leaps to

the shore, daringly defying death, and thus scoring ‘adventure

marks’, David cannot bring himself to complete the jump:

When I saw where I was, there came on me a deadly sick-

ness of fear, and I put my hand over my eyes. Alan took

me and shook me; I saw he was speaking, but the roaring

of the falls and the trouble of my mind prevented me from

hearing; only I saw his face was red with anger, and that

he stamped upon the rock. The same look showed me

the water raging by, and the mist hanging in the air; and

with that, I covered my eyes again and shuddered. [. . .]

I was now alone upon the rock, which gave me the more

room; the brandy was singing in my ears; I had this good

example fresh before me, and just wit enough to see that

if I did not leap at once, I should never leap at all. I bent

low on my knees and flung myself forth, with that kind of

anger of despair that has sometimes stood me instead of

courage. Sure enough, it was but my hands that reached

the full length; these slipped, caught again, slipped again;

and I was sliddering back into the lynn, when Alan seized

me, first by the hair, then by the collar, and with a great

strain dragged me into safety. (p.137)

In a way that anticipates on Lord Jim’s famous ‘non-jump’ in

Stevenson6.indb 29 23/10/2009 19:25


Conrad’s novel,10 David’s jump is a kind of missed jump, that

is inscribed in the text mainly on the negative mode – ‘if I did

not leap at once, I should never leap at all’ – and that is further

undermined and dissolved by the self-disparaging synonym: ‘I

flung myself forth’, a kind of reluctant, careless, half-conscious

jump, that is only a success owing to Alan’s intervention.

If the jump is such a mark of Stevenson’s modernity, how

come then that David, the first-person narrator, should be such

a reluctant jumper, should grudge the reader his adventurous

due, and consistently spoil these purple patches of adventure?

It seems that David’s attitude to jumps can be interpreted as the

symptom of Stevenson’s desire to inscribe the mutation of the

adventure novel, by situating adventure not so much in the con-

tents as in the form of the novel, by emptying the novel of actual

adventurous events, and inventing a form that would internalise

adventure. James had noted Stevenson’s ‘love of brave words as

well as brave deeds’, and indeed, David’s reluctance to jump is to

be read against his narrative ability to introduce in his account

the formal jumps and gaps that he fails to deliver physically.

David’s case perfectly illustrates Ricardou’s crucial inversion,

and the very reason why Stevenson became a favourite among

French literary critics: ‘The narration is no longer the writing of

an adventure, but the adventure of writing’.11 David may not be

very nimble at physical jumping, but he can be seen as Alan’s

literary version, as Alan’s formal double – his problematisation

of the space of the jump proving to be a literary asset, a way for

Stevenson to formalise the jump, to import its specificities in the

form of the narration itself.

A mutation of the adventure novel: David as Alan’s

formal alter ego.

Indeed, the dissolution of the motif of the jump triggers a further

degradation, and David’s failed, passive jump from the wrecked

Covenant seems to bring about a more serious literary wreckage,

Stevenson6.indb 30 23/10/2009 19:25

31Jaëck

that of the ‘old’ conventional adventure novel. Stevenson seems

to engage in an active, ‘gleeful participation in subverting his

own text’,12 as he gradually empties his novel of all the contrac-

tual ingredients of adventure. Despite David’s insistent anchor-

ing his text within the genre of the adventure novel – from the

subtitle, ‘Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the year

1751’ onwards: ‘I had left my adventure then and there’ (p. 13),

‘I began the most unhappy part of my adventures’ (p. 91), ‘tunes

of my own south country that made me fain to be home from my

adventures’ (p. 144), ‘as he thus moralised on my adventures’ (p.

200) – and despite the fact that before the wreckage, the story

is crammed full of classical topoi – an orphan boy taking the

road, a villain in a mysterious derelict old mansion, an attempted

murder, a kidnapping, blows on the head and further murders,

an eventful boat journey in the claws of a mercenary crew – the

wreckage and the pathetic jump mark the beginning of the end,

the gradual falling apart of typical adventure: the deserted island

that typically ranks high both in the hit list of adventure novels’

favourites in general and of course in Stevenson’s private system

as well, proves to be a mock-island, that only highlights the ineli-

gibility of David as a suitable hero. From then on, Kidnapped

seems to conscientiously erase or downplay virtually all outstand-

ing events: until the end, the novel will quite exclusively consist

of a flight, only interrupted by a game of cards, a pipe contest, a

pathetic quarrel and an aborted fight, that cannot exactly be seen

as ideal adventurous events.

Action gives way to the account of the broken, random course

of the two friends across the country, and the chapter titles,

symptomatically repeating one another, quite contrary to the

usual character of Adventure Novel chapter titles, inscribe the

suspension of the action and the dissolution of events:

Chapter XX. The Flight in the Heather: The Rocks.

Stevenson6.indb 31 23/10/2009 19:25


Chapter XXI. The Flight in the Heather: the Heugh of

Corrynakiegh.

Chapter XXII. The Flight in the Heather: The Moor.

Chapter XXIV. The Flight in the Heather: The Quarrel.

Chapter XXVI. End of the Flight: We pass the Forth.

The title of Chapter XVIII, which reinterprets the action in

exclusively literary terms, and evacuates contents in favour of

form and language – ‘I Talk with Alan in the Wood of Lettermore’

– explicitly defines the exact nature of the second half of the

novel. From the shipwreck onwards, Kidnapped is indeed the

story of a wandering course as well as the story of a discourse,

the metatextual story of Alan’s and David’s ‘drifting[s]’ (p. 219),

or rollings (p. 200), or ‘wandering[s]’ (ibid.), and Stevenson’s

writing approaches Gilles Deleuze’s definition: ‘Ecrire n’est pas

raconter ses souvenirs’,13 and ‘Ecrire n’a rien à voir avec signifier,

mais avec arpenter, carthographier, même des contrées à venir’.14

As the ambivalent, nearly antiphrastic subtitle, ‘Memoirs of the

Adventures’, suggests, Kidnapped could be seen as a kind of

literary mutation in progress, from Memoirs to Adventure, that

is to say from a retrospective, omniscient, distanced, continuous

narration to prospective, broken, wandering writing, only able

to follow the drifting course of the action itself. David’s failure

to jump is favourably compensated for by his ability to achieve a

great literary jump, by his exploration of the gap as a crucial tool

for literary mutation. Stevenson had indeed warned the readers

from chapter I: just like Pip in Great Expectations, who sees

language as a set of forms to be interpreted, as a game of cubes

to be manipulated, David embarks on his adventure with forms

as his only luggage, offered by Mr Campbell: ‘The first, which

is round, will likely please you best at the first off-go. [. . .] The

Stevenson6.indb 32 23/10/2009 19:25

33Jaëck

second, which is flat and square and written upon, will stand by

you through life. [. . .] And as for the last, which is cubical, that’ll

see you, it my prayerful wish, into a better land.’ (p. 10) This pow-

erfully echoes Stevenson’s claim, in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’,

that ‘A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and

a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel to a

work of art’.15 David’s aim in Kidnapped, just like Jim’s aim in

Treasure Island, is thus not to jump, to push contents aside, and

thus to embark the adventure novel on the journey to formal

innovation.

David’s formal gaps: Stevenson’s creation of narrative

discontinuity.

There remains to specify the stylistic ways in which David imports

the gap into the form of the narration itself. In the very words

of the trustworthy Mr Rankeillor, the whole of the account itself

can indeed be considered as a kind of superlative gap, as an alto-

gether missing space, that David needs to fill: ‘“The brig was lost

on June the 27th,” says he, looking in his book, “and we are now

at August the 24th. Here is a considerable hiatus, Mr Balfour,

of near upon 2 months”’ (p. 197). The word ‘hiatus’ is bound to

ring an intertextual bell: ‘the great hiatus’ is how specialists in

the Sherlock Holmes stories named the gap between Holmes’

suspended false jump down the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final

Problem’, and his spectacular return in ‘The Adventure of the

Empty House’, ten years later – another successful exploita-

tion of the literary assets of the gap. In his own account for ‘the

hiatus’, David clearly embeds the process, and comes up with a

distinctly discontinuous, dashingly adventurous form of writing.

Though David, trying to don the typical clothes of the realist

omniscient narrator, climbs ‘on top of the hill’ (p. 12) at the

beginning of his adventures to get a panoptic view of the land

and determine his course with precision, he can only manage

‘a rough direction’ (p. 12), and, not knowing where to go, to

Stevenson6.indb 33 23/10/2009 19:25


randomly explore his environment, and literally write as he

walks, randomly, with no specific aim in mind. His primary piece

of advice to the reader is to read the text against a map, thus

comforting the link between writing and exploring: ‘The reader

would do well to look at a map’ (p. 77), and indeed, the course

of David’s narration is just as discontinuous as the reader’s

accidental, arbitrary itinerary, as unsure and unspecific as their

direction: ‘But for the details of our itinerary, I am all to seek;

our way lying now by short cuts, now by great detours; our pace

being so hurried; our time of journeying usually by night; and the

names of such places as I asked and heard, being in the Gaelic

tongue and the more easily forgotten’ (p. 136). The juxtaposed

structure of Alan’s sentence, the semi-colons that build a series

of independent clauses, the ing-forms that replace the structural,

sentence-making role of a principal conjugated verb, all contrib-

ute to make the sentence an exact verbal reproduction of the dot-

ted line Stevenson asked his cousin to trace across the physical

map of Scotland to indicate their itinerary: ‘On the large map, a

red line is to show the wanderings of my hero after his shipwreck.

It must be sometimes dotted to show uncertainty; sometimes

full’ (Stevenson, ‘Note to Map’, Kidnapped, p. xxiv). Just like the

dotted line, David’s account rarely is full, and the spaces between

the full line grow wider and wider, for two crucial reasons.

On the one hand, David’s partial knowledge, his surface view of

things necessarily creates some gaps in his narration: in the same

way as Jim falls asleep on the Hispaniola and thus misses crucial

parts of the conversation between the pirates, David’s raving fits

and faintings during his fever, as well as his long illness – ‘I had

scarce lain down upon the bed before I fell into a kind of trance,

in which I continued almost the whole time of our stay in the

Cage’ (p. 163); ‘I lay bed-ridden for no more than a week’ (p. 177)

– prevent him from witnessing the whole of the action. Or it may

also be that he arrives too late, or is pushed away from the central

site of the action, as with the crucial murder of the Red Fox, that

Stevenson6.indb 34 23/10/2009 19:25

35Jaëck

leaves David and the reader with an unsolved mystery, with a

textual blank. David’s account thus replaces continuous linearity

with narrative hops and bounces, in between a few linear spells:

‘Sometimes I was broad awake and understood what passed;

sometimes I only heard voices or men snoring, like the voice of

a silly river’ (p. 163). Stevenson thus tears wide gaps in his text,

opens up the possibilities, leaving it to the imagination of the

reader to fill in the blanks, to try and reconstitute the broken,

dotted line of the narration. David often vacates the crucial posi-

tion of the narrator, or rather constitutes it as a discontinuous

space, obeying Stevenson’s sacred rule: ‘Jesus, there is but one

art, to omit’, as opposed to what he called the naturalists’ ‘insane

pursuit of completion’,16 or ‘heavy completeness’: ‘He [Zola]

would leave nothing undeveloped’ (Stevenson, Selected Letters,

p. 234). A virtual space is thus created between reader and text,

as great portions of the adventure are left unexplained: the gap

is maintained between the text and its ultimate meaning, and

these sporadic interruptions and discontinuities leave the text

in a state of suspension more than actual suspense, since these

gaps are not designed as prolepses to be filled at the end of the

novel. They are built as irreducible, ‘undecidable’ opaque zones,

that define the text as an unstable construct. They thus irredeem-

ably dilate the textual space, and its incompleteness opens what

Jankelevitch calls ‘the formal cryptic element of adventure’: ‘son

fascinant vertige vers le non-être, l’objet sans nom et mystérieux

de notre intense curiosité’. 17 Suspense, a classical element of

19th-century fiction, an entirely linear process, built with the aim

of producing a specific later effect, transforms into its modern

version of suspension: like David’s abortive jumps, his literary

gaps are meant to be left open.

Eventually, at the end of the sentence in which he describes

their broken itinerary, David comes to the essential reason why

literature should make the choice of discontinuity over linearity

and closure: he is not able to define his course with accuracy,

Stevenson6.indb 35 23/10/2009 19:25


because language itself fails him: ‘and the names of such places

as I asked and heard, being in the Gaelic tongue and the more

easily forgotten’. Indeed, in Kidnapped, language is marked as

unable to provide the reader with a coherent, continuous, trans-

parent version of reality: it is language itself that is recognised

as fundamentally opaque, resisting immediate and trustworthy

interpretation. In linguistic as well as historical terms, lowland

David, speaking ‘Scotch’, finds himself ‘betwixt and between’,

between the Gaelic tongue that he cannot understand, and that

opens wide communication gaps between himself and the people

he encounters, and the southern English accent, that presents

his own language in the disguise of a strange, unfamiliar tongue.

Repeatedly in the novel, Alan begs of his interlocutors that they

should refrain from using Gaelic for David to understand – ‘I

will ask you to speak in Scotch’ (p. 129), but the highland people

have such a minimal mastery of English that conversation is

constantly broken, difficult: ‘With what little English he had’ (p.

100); ‘for she had no English’ (p. 101).

On the other hand, David’s overhearing the soldiers triggers a

process of linguistic defamiliarisation, a sense of estrangement

from his own ‘correct’, normative, ‘right’ mother tongue: ‘It was

in this way that I first heard the right English speech. [. . .] I was

amazed at the clipping tones and the odd sing-song in which he

spoke, and no less at that strange trick of dropping out the letter

h’ (p. 141). David never quite gets used to this ‘right’ version of his

own tongue, to its phonetic and to its grammatical systems, and

will maintain a sense of distance to its rules, a feeling of a lack

of immediacy, of an empirical and approximate usage: ‘indeed I

have never grown used to it; nor yet altogether with the English

grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and there spy

out in the memoirs’ (p. 141). Indeed, in Kidnapped, language is

never allowed to stabilise as a coherent, agreed-upon, transpar-

ent system, as the ideal ‘glasshouse’ Zola deemed it to be: it is

constantly incomplete, often amorphous, a perpetually evading

Stevenson6.indb 36 23/10/2009 19:25

37Jaëck

material.18

In Earraid, when mutual comprehension proves crucial, David

can only get fragments, a dotted line indeed from the fishermen’s

elaborate and continuous line of speech, ‘whattefer’ here, ‘tide’

there:

Then he stood up in the boat and addressed me a long

while speaking fast and with many wavings of his hand. I

told him I had no Gaelic; and at this he became very angry,

and I began to suspect that he thought he was talking

English. Listening very close, I caught the word ‘whateffer’

several times; but all the rest was Gaelic, and might have

been Greek and Hebrew for me.

‘Whatever,’ said I, to show him I had caught a word.

‘Yes, yes – yes, yes,’ says he, and then he looked at the

other men, as much as to say, ‘I told you I spoke English,’

and began again as hard as ever in the Gaelic.

This time I picked out another word, ‘tide’. Then I had a

flash of hope. (p. 98)

‘I began to suspect that he thought he was talking English’:

in this elaborate paradoxical statement, David highlights that

in Kidnapped, everyone, not least the narrator, is a foreigner in

his own tongue. Meaning is not an objective result of language,

it is a performance, and the text becomes an active site for the

production of meaning, through individual leaps among the

stable dots – not even so stable after all, if all David can get is

a faulty and extremely open ‘whattefer’. There can be no objec-

tive text, Stevenson forcefully illustrates here, the gaps, or the

blanks in the text making it clear that the meaning derived from

a text is always virtual, arbitrary, transitory, that ‘the meaning

Stevenson6.indb 37 23/10/2009 19:25


of a literary text is no longer a definable entity but, if anything, a

dynamic happening’,19 an effect to be experienced and temporar-

ily achieved. David’s hazardous jump from ‘whattefer’ to ‘tide’,

along with the context of the fishermen waving hands, perfectly

illustrate Iser’s theory that ‘the iconic signs of literature consti-

tute an organization of signifiers which do not serve to designate

a signified object, but instead designate instructions for the

production of the signified’.20

As ‘whattefer’ brilliantly summarises, no reader is allowed to

stabilise the text, meaning is always a decision made, and not a

logical, compulsory consequence of an adequate, objective set of

words. Indeed, even the bold physical jumper Alan, who we may

have taken for a heroic remains of the ‘older’ adventure novel,

teaches the same lesson to David: as he wants to pass on a call for

help to John Breck, he reckons that he will simply need to have

his silver button deposited on his window-sill, and from that

Breck will be able, through an elaborate sequence of reasoning,

to guess where they are hiding, and shortly turn up. David, awed

by the seemingly ridiculous complexity of the process, proposes

that they should quite simply write him an explicit request: ‘“Eh,

man,” said I, drolling with him a little, “you’re very ingenious!

But would it not be simpler for you to write him a few words in

black and white?”’ (p. 148), Alan makes it clear that there is no

such thing as a few simple transitive words in black and white,

or at least that these simple words collide against a necessary

opacity – an opacity that is of course major in John Breck’s case:

‘It would be a sore job for John Breck to read it. He would have

to go to school for two-three years; and it’s possible we might be

wearied waiting on him’ (p. 148). His method forcefully asserts

that meaning is always an elaborate, hazardous construction,

that no one can rely on the supposed limpidity of language.

David’s linguistic ‘inbetweenness’, his careful dislocation of the

naturalist belief in the solidity of the langage as a system of com-

munication, his insistence on its opacity illustrate Deleuze’s defi-

Stevenson6.indb 38 23/10/2009 19:25

39Jaëck

nition of a writer as ‘a foreigner in his own tongue’: ‘Nous devons

être bilingue même en une seule langue, nous devons avoir une

langue mineure à l’intérieur de notre langue, nous devons faire

de notre propre langue un usage mineur. Le multilinguisme n’est

pas seulement la possession de plusieurs systèmes dont chacun

serait homogène en lui-même; c’est d’abord la ligne de fuite ou

de variation qui affecte chaque système en l’empêchant d’être

homogène’.2 Nearly a century later, Gilles Deleuze indeed fol-

lowed the NRF in their admiration of British late 19th-century

writers, in a famous article titled ‘De la supériorité de la lit-

térature anglaise-américaine’: according to him, these writers

are remarkable for their defamiliarisation of language, for their

ability to ‘jump intervals, jump from one interval to another’.22

David’s use of language elects him as one of these most success-

ful formal jumpers, who managed to deconstruct, to open up the

seeming compactness of language and explore the dynamism of

the gaps.

In the same way as David does not quite manage a single com-

plete jump in Kidnapped, and falters in between, he does not

achieve narrative closure either. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll

and Mr Hyde ends with a very dissident indefinite form and

highlights the arbitrariness of the ending: ‘I bring the story of

that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end’. In Kidnapped, Stevenson

comes up even more with ‘an end of sorts’, with a fundamen-

tally suspended ending. David’s last sentence brings him to the

brink of the final step of his adventure, to the crucial moment

when all the drifting could finally get channeled into resolution:

‘The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very

doors of the British Linen Company’s bank’ (p. 219). In a totally

unexpected and disorienting way, David halts just there, and

leaves the reader stranded just before ‘the advent of the (final)

event’, right in the middle – the jump will remain suspended for

six years, until the publication of Catriona in Atalanta, in 1892,

the opening sentence of which takes up where David’s narration

Stevenson6.indb 39 23/10/2009 19:25


had ended in Kidnapped and eventually bridges the gap – with

the notable exception of what happened within doors: ‘The 25th

day of August, 1751, about two in the afternoon, I, David Balfour,

came forth of the British Linen Company, a porter attending me

with a bag of money, and some of the chief of these merchants

bowing me from their doors’.

Moreover, David does not have the final word, and the literary

necessity of suspension is theorised by a totally heterogeneous,

intrusive third-person narrator. In brackets, both inside and

outside the novel, both a remainder and a literary agenda, his

intervention reads like an unstable, unidentified textual object,

like a textual window that opens onto a text-to-come. The anony-

mous editor makes it clear that the ending is not the compulsory

objective outcome of a narrative chain, but a matter of artistic

decision, a matter of arbitrary and temporary ‘inclination’, thus

highlighting the importance of form and artistic construction

over realist mimesis: ‘The present editor inclines for the time

to say farewell to David’ (p. 217). He settles the end of the text

in a paradoxical state of permanent suspension – ‘How Alan

escaped may some day set forth’ (p. 218; italics added) – of

indeterminacy and antiphrasis: ‘whatever befell them, it was

not dishonour, and whatever failed them, they were not found

wanting to themselves’ (p. 219). It is the perfect liminal state of

adventure,23 in the intense present when the jump, or the text, is

as yet a dynamic impulse, a possibility, a temptation.

Stevenson6.indb 40 23/10/2009 19:25

41Jaëck

Notes

1 Jean-Pierre Naugrette analyses in close detail the ambivalent duality of Kidnapped in the general context of Stevenson’s other novels in Robert Louis Stevenson. L’Aventure et son double (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1987), pp. 91-99.

2 Jacques Rivière, ‘Le roman d’aventure’, Nouvelle Revue Française (mai – juillet 1913); repr. Le Roman d’Aventure (Paris: Syrtes, 2000), p. 69.

3 Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, ed. by Donald McFarlan (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 137. All subsequent page references in the text will be to this edition.

4 Here we may remember ‘Stevenson, writer of boundaries’, subject of many of the essays in Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, ed. by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (Maddison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

5 The notion of ‘incident’, the idea that the form of a novel should be ‘incidental’, was crucial to Stevenson. In a letter to Henry James, he pleaded: ‘Could you pitch the incidents [. . .] in a slightly more emphatic way – as if it were an episode from one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure?’ The Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Ernest Mehew (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 272.

6 Rivière, p. 66.

7 In Une Amitié littéraire: Henry James Robert Louis Stevenson (Paris: Payot, 1987), p. 30, Michel Le Bris defines ‘the event’ as ‘le seul talisman contre le credo réaliste’.

8 Marcel Schwob, Spicilège (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896; repr. 1960).

9 My translation of ‘Sous prétexte de réalisme et de logique humaine, les romanciers français ont exilé du roman l’imprévu, l’imprévu qui est presque toute la vie […]. Un Defoë, un Fielding, un Dickens, un Stevenson ont la passion de l’aventure: ils y baignent leurs personnages comme dans un réactif vivement coloré’ (Henry Ghéon, ‘L’histoire de Mr Polly, par H. G. Wells’, Nouvelle Revue Française, Jan. 1912, 126.

10 For a further study of the treatment of the motif of the jump in Lord Jim, see Nathalie Jaëck, ‘Le saut manqué: aventure et imminence de

Stevenson6.indb 41 23/10/2009 19:25


Sherlock Holmes à Lord Jim’, Aventure(s), ed. by Hervé Fourtina, Nathalie Jaëck and Joël Richard (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008), pp. 131-142.

11 ‘Le récit n’est plus l’écriture d’une aventure, mais l’aventure d’une écriture’ – Jean Ricardou, Pour une Théorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 43).

12 Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 53.

13 Gilles Deleuze, Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1991), p. 12.

14 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 11.

15 ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Longman’s Magazine, 5 (Nov. 1884), 139-47; repr. in Memories and Portraits (1887). This response to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ in Longman’s Magazine, September 1884, led to a life-long friendship, and a particularly remarkable correspondence on the nature and aims of fiction. The complete letters can be found in Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. A Record of their Friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948).

16 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Note on Realism’, The Magazine of Art 7 (Nov. 1883), quoted and commented on in Oliver S. Buckton, ‘Reanimating Stevenson’s Corpus’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 55 (2000), 22-58.

17 Vladimir Jankelevitch, ‘L’Aventure, l’Ennui, le Sérieux’, Philosophie morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 818.

18 Emile Zola, ‘Les romanciers naturalistes’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mitterand, 15 vols. (Paris: Tchou, 1966-70), XI, 92.

19 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 22.

20 Iser, p. 64.

21 Gilles Deleuze, in Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p 11.

22 Ibid., p. 51 (‘Sauter des intervalles, sauter d’un intervalle à l’autre’).

23 ‘L’aventure porte la désinence du futur. L’aventure est liée à ce temps du temps qu’on appelle le temps futur et dont le caractère essentiel est d’être indéterminé, parce qu’il est l’empire énigmatique des possibles’, Jankelevitch, p. 828.

Stevenson6.indb 42 23/10/2009 19:25

43Niederhoff

Unreliable narration in The Master of Ballantrae: an external approach

Burkhard Niederhoff

Introduction

‘The full truth’ – these are the first words of Ephraim Mackellar,

the principal narrator of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The

Master of Ballantrae. In fact, the narrator insists twice more

within the space of a single paragraph that he will tell the truth

and nothing but the truth:

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long

been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome.

It so befell that I was intimately mingled with the last

years and history of the house; and there does not live one

man so able as myself to make these matters plain, or so

desirous to narrate them faithfully. I knew the Master;

on many secret steps of his career I have an authentic

memoir in my hand; I sailed with him on his last voyage

almost alone; I made one upon that winter’s journey of

which so many tales have gone abroad; and I was there at

the man’s death. As for my late Lord Durrisdeer, I served

him and loved him near twenty years; and thought more

of him the more I knew of him. Altogether, I think it not

fit that so much evidence should perish; the truth is a debt

I owe my lord’s memory; and I think my old years will

flow more smoothly, and my white hair lie quieter on the

pillow, when the debt is paid.1

Evidently, Mackellar protests too much. The repeated empha-

sis on his veracity is counter productive. Instead of convincing us

Stevenson6.indb 43 23/10/2009 19:25


of his reliability, Mackellar raises a suspicion that we will hear

something less than the ‘[t]he full truth of this odd matter’. This

suspicion is not allayed when we learn that Mackellar is biased

in favour of one of the brothers who are locked in a fatal conflict

in this novel. Having served Henry Durie, the younger brother,

for many years, he now feels obliged to protect his memory. In

view of this bias, phrases like ‘to narrate them faithfully’ or ‘the

truth is a debt I owe my lord’s memory’ become ambiguous.

Will Mackellar be true to the facts or will he be true to Henry?

Evidently, the latter reading undermines the former.

The clues to the narrator’s fallibility planted in the first para-

graph provide a good indication of what awaits the reader in the

rest of the novel. The Master of Ballantrae is a treasure trove of

signals of unreliable narration, which may be distinguished as

follows. First, the novel explicitly foregrounds the issues of truth

and reliability, as it does in the very first words from Mackellar’s

pen. Second, it provides a character study of Mackellar which

emphasises traits and motives that undermine his authority

as a narrator. Third, it contains numerous discrepancies both

within Mackellar’s narrative and between this narrative and the

accounts given by others. The ‘many tales’ of the first paragraph

are not merely referred to; they are woven into the tapestry of

the novel in the form of accounts given by narrators other than

Mackellar as well as numerous instances of gossip reported by

him. The conflict between the brothers is thus echoed in a con-

flict between a multiplicity of voices and versions that contradict

and invalidate each other. Focusing on the three kinds of signals

distinguished here may be described as an internal approach to

narrative unreliability.2 It is no doubt a rewarding one, but in the

present essay I should like to take a different approach, which

may be described as external. To clarify what is meant by this

external approach, a brief foray into narrative theory is required.

Stevenson6.indb 44 23/10/2009 19:25

45Niederhoff

Internal and external approaches to narrative

unreliability

We owe the concept of the (un)reliable narrator to Wayne Booth,

who defines it as follows: ‘I have called a narrator reliable when

he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work

(which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he

does not.’3 This definition would appear to be in broad agreement

with the internal approach sketched above. While the account of

the three kinds of signals tells us how we detect an unreliable

narrator, Booth’s definition focuses on the effect of such detec-

tive work: once we have noticed that a narrator is unreliable, we

begin to receive two messages that are not in accordance with

each other, an overt message coming from the narrator and

a covert one coming from the implied author. At any rate, the

standards by which the unreliable narrator is measured and

found wanting are supplied by the work itself; the author only

enters the scene insofar as he can be inferred from the work.

A thorough revision of Booth’s theory of unreliable narration

has been proposed by Ansgar Nünning. Drawing on cognitive

theory and frame theory, Nünning argues that readers approach

texts with a number of frames, i.e. with their views of the world,

of normal behaviour, of the rules of literary genres. When the

text does not fit into these frames, readers resort to a number of

interpretive strategies to solve the problem, one of these being the

attribution of unreliability to the narrator. The principal innova-

tion in this theory is the crucial role attributed to the reader.

While in Booth’s account the text or the implied author provides

the standards from which the narrator deviates, in Nünning’s

view these standards are brought to the text by the reader: ‘[W]

hether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on

the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and

those of the implied author but between [sic] the distance that

separates the narrator’s view of the world from the reader’s or

critic’s world-model and standards of normalcy.’4

Stevenson6.indb 45 23/10/2009 19:25


As one might expect, Nünning’s theory has been criticized by

a number of theorists. James Phelan, for instance, has proposed

a tripartite model of unreliable narration in which the implied

author, the text and the reader find a place.5 However, to my

knowledge, the relativist consequences of Nünning’s theory have

not been sufficiently exposed. Consider his statement that a

‘pederast would not find anything wrong with Nabokov’s Lolita’

(Nünning, p. 61). In my view, a pederast who is an alert reader

of literary texts would find something wrong with the narrator

of Lolita – assuming that the narrator is unreliable, which the

critics are not agreed upon.6 To use a less complicated example:

Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a novel about an

agnostic woman who becomes a Catholic and even a kind of

saint. Interestingly, the first-person narrator of the novel, the

former lover of the woman, is and remains an agnostic. Since I

am an agnostic myself, I should, according to Nünning’s view of

the matter, find this narrator reliable; the agnostic ‘frames’ that

I bring to the text are in agreement with those of the narrator.

However, my response to the novel is more complex. (1) I realize

that there is a Catholic argument in the novel. (2) I also realize

that the narrator stubbornly refuses to accept this argument and

ignores all the evidence presented in favour of it, in other words

that he is unreliable. (3) Nevertheless, I am not persuaded by the

argument of the book, holding on to my agnosticism.

Steps 1 and 2 of my response to Greene’s novel are part of

understanding it; step 3 belongs to the final evaluation. Of

course, our evaluation of a text will colour our understanding

of it (and vice versa), but a responsible reader will attempt to

keep the two separate. As E. M. Forster once memorably put

it: ‘Certainly Dante wrote over the gates of Hell that they were

made by the power, wisdom and love of God [...] and neither the

Middle West nor the Soviets nor ourselves can be expected to

agree with that. But there is no reason why we should not under-

stand it, and stretch our minds against his, although they have a

Stevenson6.indb 46 23/10/2009 19:25

47Niederhoff

different shape.’7 There is no room for this kind of stretching in

Nünning’s theory. However, it is an act of mental gymnastics that

we perform all the time. The mere fact that we do not share all

of the beliefs held by the narrator of the Divine Comedy does not

render him unreliable in our eyes. To my mind, the stretching

described by Forster is not only a basic hermeneutic obligation;

it is also one of the pleasures and rewards of reading.

Despite my disagreement with Nünning, I will follow him

halfway by introducing an external standard in my interpreta-

tion of Mackellar’s unreliability. This external standard is not

provided by the reader but by the author – to be more precise,

by other texts from the author’s pen. Incidentally, this is not an

unprecedented idea. In earlier, less theoretically minded ages,

critics in search of interpretive standards resorted to the author

without thinking twice about it. In the debate about John Dowell,

the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Arthur

Mizener, the author of the standard biography of Ford, argued

for the reliability of Dowell by pointing out that his views are in

essential agreement with the views of the author who created

him.8 Admittedly, in this day and age an invocation of the author

as a standard of interpretation clashes with two critical tenets

that command more or less widespread support: the New Critical

insistence on the autonomy and integrity of the work, enshrined

in the doctrine of ‘the intentional fallacy’,9 and the burial of the

author performed by Roland Barthes and other poststructural-

ists who reject him as an authoritarian father figure attempting

to check the free play of signification. The external approach

suggested here also makes another unfashionable assumption,

namely that the author is a relatively stable subject with a coher-

ent vision that extends across several works, not a darkling plain

on which ever-changing discourses clash by night.

In view of the considerable theoretical problems that the

external, author-oriented approach is fraught with, I will confine

myself to a modest proposal. It is not my intention to erect the

Stevenson6.indb 47 23/10/2009 19:25


author as the ultimate standard of narrative reliability, replacing

Booth’s implied author or Nünning’s reader in this role. Taking

other texts by the same author into consideration is introduced

– or rather reintroduced – as an additional strategy that helps us

in the difficult process of detecting and interpreting unreliable

narration. This strategy is not meant to replace but to comple-

ment the internal approach, which must remain the central one.

My proposal is also pragmatic rather than theoretical. Instead

of further justifying my approach, I will practice it, following

the belief that ye shall know them by their fruits. Incidentally,

this pragmatic approach would appear to be compatible with the

views held by the eloquent herald of the author’s death. In ‘De

l’oeuvre au texte’, Barthes writes: ‘Ce n’est pas que l’Auteur ne

puisse «revenir» dans le Texte, dans son texte; mais c’est alors, si

l’on peut dire, à titre d’invité; s’il est romancier, il s’y inscrit com-

me l’un de ses personnages, dessiné dans le tapis; son inscription

n’est plus privilégiée, paternelle, aléthique, mais ludique [...].’10

It is in this role that Stevenson will be invited into the critical

debate about Mackellar, as a contributor to this debate, not as its

final arbiter. But before this is possible, we have to take one more

look at the novel itself, analysing how Mackellar’s narrative is

governed by an overriding concern with justification.

Narrative as justification

At one point, Mackellar describes his narrative as ‘a memoran-

dum written only to justify his [Alexander’s] father’ (p. 143).

This phrase provides the key to Mackellar’s narrative. Its main

goal is moral justification, in particular the justification of Henry

and of Mackellar himself in his role as Henry’s staunchest sup-

porter. The very first paragraph, quoted above, is a case in point,

being nothing but a justification of the narrative itself. Mackellar

begins his narrative by presenting his credentials (‘there does not

live one man so able as myself to make these matters plain’). He

cannot tell a story, however interesting, without first providing

Stevenson6.indb 48 23/10/2009 19:25

49Niederhoff

a justification for his doing so. The concern with justification

also determines the very texture of Mackellar’s style, called

‘Mackellarese’ by Stevenson.11 The writer was aware that he had

created a distinctive style expressive of the personality of his

narrator, and he was worried that it would prove inadequate for

the more romantic and adventurous portions of the novel: ‘How,

with a narrator like Mackellar, should I transact the melo drama

in the wilderness? How, with his style, so full of disabilities,

attack a passage which must be either altogether seizing or

altogether silly and absurd?’12 The ‘disabilities’ of Mackellar’s

style stem from his concern with justification. Instead of telling a

story in all its colourful detail, he wants to present a moral argu-

ment. Thus he prefers summary to scene, the point of view of the

narrator to that of the character, and comment to narrative. His

favourite forms of comment are psychological explanation and

moral evaluation because these two are most conducive to the

purpose of justification, to assigning praise or blame, innocence

or guilt.13

A good example of ‘Mackellarese’ is the following passage,

which describes the narrator’s journey to his future employer,

Lord Durrisdeer – in other words, his own entrance, as a char-

acter, into the story he tells us. Interestingly, this entrance is

through a labyrinth of ‘ill tales’, of legend and gossip:

I made the last of my journey in the cold end of December,

in a mighty dry day of frost, and who should be my guide

but Patey Macmorland, brother of Tam! For a tow-head-

ed, bare-legged brat of ten, he had more ill tales upon his

tongue than ever I heard the match of; having drunk en

betimes in his brother’s cup. I was still not so old my self;

pride had not yet the upper hand of curiosity; and in deed

it would have taken [= captivated] any man, that cold

morning, to hear all the old clashes of the country, and be

shown all the pla ces by the way where strange things had

Stevenson6.indb 49 23/10/2009 19:25


fallen out. I had tales of Claverhouse as we came through

the bogs, and tales of the devil as we came over the top of

the scaur […]; and along all the road the Duries and poor

Mr Henry were in the first rank of slander. My mind was

thus highly prejudiced against the family I was about to

serve […]. (p. 19)

The point of view is clearly that of the narrator, not of the

character. While the young Mackellar is fascinated by the tales he

hears, the old Mackellar telling the story disapproves of them. He

uses strongly derogatory terms such as ‘ill’, ‘slander’ and ‘preju-

diced’ to express his disapproval. He also uses a loaded gram-

matical construction like ‘who should be my guide but …’, which

indicates his retrospective resentment at having been guided by

Patey Macmoreland, a partisan of James and thus a member

of the enemy camp. In addition to evaluating the characters,

Mackellar also explains their motives. Patey’s indulging in gos-

sip and slander betrays the influence of his brother; Mackellar’s

eagerness to hear this gossip is due to his youthful curiosity. The

combination of evaluation and motivation results in a defence

of Mackellar’s fascination with Patey’s tales. The comment at

the end of the passage (‘it would have taken any man …’) would

appear to be a psychological generalization, but in the present

context it functions primarily as a justification. Surely, Mackellar

seems to suggest, he cannot be blamed for something that any-

one would have done under the same circumstances. Thus the

principal narrator of the novel feels obliged to justify not only his

telling of stories but also his listening to them.

The obsession with justification in Mackellar’s narrative

becomes all the more con spi cuous when we read the story which

James tells on board the Nonesuch. This tale pro vides a mise en

abyme of the entire novel; it resembles Mackellar’s narrative in

its story line as it also describes the fatal conflict between two

men.14 It differs from Mackellar’s narrative, however, in its

Stevenson6.indb 50 23/10/2009 19:25

51Niederhoff

method, being characterized by an utter neglect of justification:

‘It matters not what was the ground of the count’s enmity; but as

he had a firm design to be revenged, and that with safety to him-

self, he kept it secret even from the baron. Indeed, that is the first

principle of vengeance; and hatred betrayed is hatred impotent’

(p. 160, my italics). The first of the italicized sentences would be

unthinkable in the narrative of Mackellar, who is obsessed with

motivations. The second sentence in italics is a generalization that

superficially resembles Mackellar’s ‘it would have taken any man

...’; but here the generalization does not amount to an apology or

a justification. The point that James is making is a purely strategic

one – and he is also giving a veiled warning to Mackellar, who has

betrayed his hatred of James in more than one way.

Stevenson on justification

If we now turn to other writings by Stevenson, we find that he is

highly sceptical about justification. A first example that comes

to mind is ‘Markheim’, a story about a murderer who kills a

pawnbroker. When Markheim is still in the pawnbroker’s house,

looking for money, he is joined by a supernatural visitor of a

rather protean kind. The visitor seems to be Mark heim’s double,

but he also assumes the role of the devil, suggesting a Faustian

pact that involves support of Markheim in further crimes in

exchange for his soul. However, Markheim rejects the offer as he

believes himself to be innocent. He gives a lengthy and eloquent

self-justification, arguing that the ‘giants of circumstance’ have

dragged him about against his will, and that his actions do not

reflect his true nature: ‘“My life”’, he argues, ‘“is but a travesty

and slander on myself.”’15 The dispassionate replies of his visi-

tor, however, gradually undermine Markheim’s belief in his own

innocence. Eventually he realizes the hollowness and futility of

his self-justification and decides to turn himself in. The double,

who responds to this by undergoing ‘a wonderful and lovely

change’, turns out to have been not the devil but rather the devil’s

Stevenson6.indb 51 23/10/2009 19:25


advocate.

Stevenson’s scepticism about justification is not limited to the

case of murderers con ducting ethical debates with their doubles.

It is much more general, being partly due to his Calvinist herit-

age. Protestantism in general, and Calvinism in particular, insist

on human sinfulness, on the necessity of divine grace, and on the

concomitant impossibility of human beings justifying themselves

by their own means. Despite Stevenson’s agnostic tendencies,

the Calvinist sense of sin survives in his thinking in a secularized

version, as a highly developed ethical sensibility which leads to

rather sceptical conclusions about our moral standing. Consider,

for instance, his exegesis of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not

steal’ in the second chapter of Lay Morals. After dismissing the

literal reading of the commandment as ‘only that least minimum

of meaning without which society would fall in pieces’ (Works

XV: 426), he goes on to give a more rigorous reading, discussing,

under the guise of ‘a friend of mine’ (Works XV: 427), his own

case as the only son of wealthy and loving parents. After com-

paring himself with a less privileged and more hard-working fel-

low student, he comes to rather uncomfortable conclusions: ‘Had

he [i.e. Stevenson himself] not filched that fellow’s birthright? At

best was he not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and

greedily devouring stolen goods?’ (Works XV: 428). Here and

elsewhere, Stevenson shows a strong conviction of human fal-

libility, which makes any attempt at justifying ourselves precari-

ous at best.

Stevenson’s scepticism about justification is not only fuelled by

his awareness of moral fallibility. It is also grounded in epistemo-

logical doubts about our ability to recognize and to communicate

the truth, especially when it comes to relationships between

human beings. In ‘Truth of Intercourse’, one of the essays from

Virginibus Puerisque, Stevenson attacks the ‘monstrous propo-

sition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie’. He goes

on to argue that ‘it is easier to draw the outline of a mountain

Stevenson6.indb 52 23/10/2009 19:25

53Niederhoff

than the changing appearance of a face; and truth in human rela-

tions is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize,

harder to communicate’ (Works, II: 329).16 The epistemological

scepticism expressed in these remarks is applied to the subject

of justification in ‘Reflections and Remarks on Human Life’.

This essay, which was drafted in 1880, begins with a passage

that, to my knowledge, is Stevenson’s most explicit critique of

justification:

I. Justice aNd JustificatioN. – (1) It is the business of this

life to make excuses for others, but none for ourselves. We

should be clearly per suaded of our own misconduct, for

that is the part of know ledge in which we are most apt to

be defective. (2) Even justice is no right of a man’s own,

but a thing, like the king’s tribute, which shall never be

his, but which he should strive to see rendered another.

None was ever just to me; none ever will be. You may rea-

sonably aspire to be chief minister or sovereign pontiff:

but not to be justly regarded in your own character and

acts. You know too much to be satisfied. For justice is but

an earthly currency, paid to appearances; you may see

another superficially righted; but be sure he has got too

little or too much; and in your own case rest content with

what is paid you. It is more just than you suppose; that

your virtues are misunderstood is a price you pay to keep

your meannesses concealed. (3) When you seek to justify

yourself to others, you may be sure you will plead falsely.

[...] (4) [...] Justification to indif ferent persons is, at best,

an impertinent intrusion. [...] (5) It is a question hard to

be resolved, whether you should at any time criminate

another to defend yourself. I have done it many times, and

always had a troubled conscience for my pains. (Works,

XV: 391 f.)

Stevenson6.indb 53 23/10/2009 19:25


The critique of justification rests on a mixture of epistemologi-

cal and psychological grounds. While we know, or wish to know,

very little about the motives and circumstances that count against

us, we are fully aware of the motives and circumstances that are

in our favour. It may be argued that the passage does not apply to

Mackellar as he gives a justification of somebody else, i.e. Henry,

not of himself. However, since Mackellar is Henry’s closest ally,

he also justifies himself in justifying Henry.17 Furthermore, the

two passages quoted above in which Mackellar vindicates his

telling of and his listening to stories show that self-justification is

a prominent feature of his narrative.

The passage from ‘Reflections and Remarks on Human Life’

discusses justice and justification in financial terms: ‘the king’s

tribute ... an earthly currency ... rest content with what is paid

you ... a price you pay’. Mackellar uses precisely these financial

metaphors to refer to his narrative, another indication of how

closely it is bound up with Stevenson’s views on justification. In

the initial paragraph, he writes: ‘The truth is a debt I owe my lord’s

memory; and I think my old years will flow more smoothly, and

my white hair lie quieter on the pil low, when the debt is paid’ (p.

9, my italics). He refers to the collection of papers he hands over

to Alison at Henry’s sickbed as ‘my budget’ (p. 112), a budget that

resembles the novel as a whole in its form, a miscellany of diverse

documents, and in its purpose, the justification of Henry and the

incrimination of James. Mackellar keeps the books for Henry both

in the literal and in the metaphorical sense, seeing to it that the

financial and the moral balances will be in his employer’s favour.

The bookkeeping mentality that informs Mackellar’s narrative

echoes Henry’s approach to moral matters. When Henry agrees

to the sale of a piece of land to finance his brother’s plans in India,

his aim is to win his father’s approbation and to score a moral

victory over James. ‘He sold them his consent at a dear rate’,

Mackellar comments in highly revealing language (p. 85, my

italics). The conflict is literally over a sale, but through Henry’s

Stevenson6.indb 54 23/10/2009 19:25

55Niederhoff

negotiations it becomes part of a more complex transaction. He

insists that the financial loss he incurs will be repaid as a moral

gain. Earlier on, he responds in a similar fashion to a letter from

his brother, in which he is called a ‘niggardly dog’ and asked for

a considerable sum of money: ‘“But I will not sit down under the

imputation [...] I am as good as he, I am a better man than he, I

call on God to prove it! [...] I, niggardly? [...] O, you all think so!

Well, you shall see, and he shall see, and God shall see. If I ruin

the estate and go barefoot, I shall stuff this bloodsucker!”’ (p. 62)

Even Mackellar recognizes that there is something pathological

about this response; he refers to the ‘backforemost pleasure’ (p.

65) that Henry takes in complying with James’ financial requests.

Henry wishes to turn financial into moral capital. In other words,

he assumes that justification can be bought. Interestingly, James

provides an alternative to the accountant mentality of his oppo-

nents. When Mackellar attempts to murder him, James does not

enter this attempt in his books as proof of his enemies’ malice

and of his own moral superiority (he keeps no books of this

sort). Instead, he tells Mackellar, ‘you have risen forty feet in my

esteem’ (p. 165). The relationship between the two men improves

considerably after one of them has attempted to kill the other.

The financial imagery used to describe Mackellar’s and Henry’s

concern with justification emphasizes that they are seeking some

kind of gain or reward. This striving for a reward, even if it is only

an immaterial one, clashes with a central tenet in Stevenson’s

moral philosophy, the tenet that virtue will and should not be

rewarded in any way. As he writes in ‘A Christmas Sermon’, ‘a

man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when

it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and

does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must

not ask’ (Works, XV: 346, my italics). It would be an understate-

ment to say that Stevenson no longer believes in a heavenly or

secular reward for virtue – he positively resents it. ‘But the com-

mon, trashy mind of our generation’, he writes in the preface to

Stevenson6.indb 55 23/10/2009 19:25


Familiar Studies of Men and Books, ‘is still aghast [...] at any word

of an unsuccessful virtue’ (Works, III: 12). In a letter to Edmund

Gosse, he succinctly states that ‘[t]he soul of piety was killed long

ago by that idea of reward’.18

Stevenson on the Puritan school

A final piece of external evidence that sheds a critical light on

Mackellar’s personality, his values and his reliability as a narra-

tor comes from The Amateur Emigrant. In the chapter ‘Steerage

Types’, Stevenson argues:

One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and

that is, the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of cul-

ture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. Can it be that

the Puritan school, by divorcing a man from nature, by

thinning out his instincts, and setting a stamp of its dis-

approval on whole fields of human activity and interest,

leads at last directly to material greed? (Works, II: 44 f.)

These remarks are fairly close to Max Weber’s ideas about the

Calvinist origins of capitalism. Weber’s Calvinist turned capitalist

and the graduate of Stevenson’s Puritan school share a number

of traits. In both, religious zeal survives in a negative morality

based on prohibitions and self-denial. The one secular activity in

which they engage vigorously is the pursuit of money, more as an

end in itself than as a means of purchasing pleasure. Thus their

attitude is characterized by what Weber calls ‘innerweltliche

Askese’, a secular asceticism that is not directed towards a mysti-

cal communion with other worlds but firmly situated within this

world.19

Stevenson’s remarks on the Puritan school and the personal-

ity formed by it have an obvious bearing on Mackellar and on

Henry. This becomes all the more evident if we compare them

with James, who appears not to have been influenced by this

Stevenson6.indb 56 23/10/2009 19:25

57Niederhoff

school at all. One of the ‘fields of human activity and interest’

that Mackellar fails to cultivate is the opposite sex: a confirmed

bachelor, he believes that there is the ‘devil in women’ (p. 68).

As he himself admits, ‘I have never had much toleration for the

female sex, possibly not much understanding; and being far

from a bold man, I have ever shunned their company’ (p. 68 ff.).

Henry, likewise, takes little interest in women. His marriage with

Alison seems to be motivated by her money and his desire for

an heir; as soon as Alexander is born, he loses interest in her

(p. 124). James, on the other hand, is unfailingly popular with

women, including Alison, who marries Henry not for love but out

of a sense of duty.

The world of art is another field of interest that is cultivated

by James and neglected by Mackellar and Henry. James is a

consummate storyteller, as is shown by his tale on board the

Nonesuch. Mackellar, on the other hand, is not at ease with his

role as a narrator. When he does not justify his telling of stories

or his listening to them, he condemns these activities: ‘I recalled

an ancient sailor-man who dwelt in a lone house […] and how

the boys would troop out of Leith on a Satur day, and sit and

listen to his swearing tales, as thick as crows about a carrion:

a thing I often remarked as I went by, a young student, on my

own more meditative holiday di ver sion’ (p. 143). As for Henry,

he ‘could speak of little else but business and was never the best

of company’ (p. 27).

The repeated references to singing also indicate the gulf

between Mackellar and Henry on the one hand, and James on

the other. Mackellar reproves a young maid for singing, which

characteristically earns him ‘the enmity of all the petticoats

about the house’ (p. 68). On the one occasion on which Henry

sings, he displays a complete lack of musical talent and practice.

The song is the ballad ‘Twa Corbies’, or rather two verses from it

that express his wish to see his brother dead:

Stevenson6.indb 57 23/10/2009 19:25


I was in bed, lying there awake, when I heard him stum-

bling on the stair and singing. My lord had no gift of music,

his brother had all the graces of the family, so that when

I say singing, you are to understand a manner of high,

carolling utterance, which was truly neither speech nor

song. Something not unlike is to be heard upon the lips

of children, ere they learn shame [...]. He took it first in

the time and manner of a rant; presently this ill-favoured

gleefulness abated, he began to dwell upon the notes more

feelingly, and sank at last into a degree of maudlin pathos

that was to me scarce bearable. (p. 189 ff.)

Consider, by contrast, the episode in which James sings an

Irish ballad on his return from his exile in France:

He sang it well, even as a song; but he did better yet as a

performer. I have heard famous actors, when there was

not a dry eye in the Edinburgh theatre; a great wonder

to behold; but no more wonderful than how the Master

played upon that little ballad, and on those who heard

him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point

of failing, and now to conquer his distress, so that words

and music seemed to pour out of his own heart and his

own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs Henry. And his

art went further yet [...]. (p. 83)

Characteristically, Mackellar can think of James’ performance

only in a context of duplicity and intrigue. He presents it as a

cunning manoeuvre in ‘the siege of Mrs Henry’ (p. 83), as part of

an attempt to seduce her or at the very least to alienate her from

her husband. Mackellar has little appreciation of art for art’s

sake. On the contrary, the word ‘art’ here is almost synonymous

with deception and manipulation.

The theme of ‘material greed’ mentioned in Stevenson’s

Stevenson6.indb 58 23/10/2009 19:25

59Niederhoff

account of the Puritan school is all too evident in The Master

of Ballantrae. I have already touched upon the bookkeeping

mentality of both Mackellar and Henry. Their overriding interest

is in the making and saving of money. Henry ‘took a chief hand,

almost from a boy, in the management of the estates’; in doing

so, he has acquired ‘the reputation of a tyrant and a miser’ (p.

11). His brother considers him a ‘niggardly dog’ (62), and even

his loyal supporter Mackellar describes him as ‘parsi monious’ (p.

65). Mackellar shares Henry’s ruling passion; his work as a stew-

ard and book keeper fits his personality. He reveals his accountant

mentality, for instance, when he first sees the Durrisdeer estate.

‘The money sunk here unproductively’, he comments after a brief

description of the house and its surroundings, ‘would have quite

restored the family; but as it was, it cost a revenue to keep it up’ (p.

19). James, on the other hand, has little interest in money itself;

he likes to spend it – in considerable quantities – to finance his

pleasures and his political schemes. His mentality is as different

from an accountant’s as possible: ‘“I must have all or none”’ (p.

167), he tells Mackellar during their passage across the Atlantic.

Characteristically, the last episode in his life is a treasure hunt,

a literary topos which reflects this all-or-nothing attitude. It is

also revealing that James likes to take a momentous decision by

spinning a coin, an action that reflects his lack of prudence but

also, on a symbolical level, his indifference to the idea of holding

on to money.

In contrasting Henry and Mackellar on the one hand and

James on the other, it is not my intention to turn Mackellar’s

view of the brothers on its head, presenting Henry as villain

and James as victim. James is in some ways undeniably evil.

However, he is a more complex character than Mackellar makes

him out to be. The same is true, in a different way, of Henry and

of Mackellar himself. Stevenson’s critical remarks elsewhere in

his writings on justification and on the Puritan school help us see

the problematic sides of their personalities and of their values:

Stevenson6.indb 59 23/10/2009 19:25


the disapproval of whole fields of human activity and interest,

the neglect of joy and happiness, the obsession with money, and

a bookkeeping mentality that extends into the moral realm. This

bookkeeping mentality also undermines Mackellar’s reliability as

a narrator. Paradoxically, it is his concern with justification, with

establishing the moral balance that makes Mackellar take no

account of happiness, missing what Stevenson, in his critique of

the Puritan school, describes as ‘perhaps two-thirds of morality’.

Notes

1 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 9, my italics; henceforth cited in the text. I should like to thank Richard Dury, Alexa Keuneke, Sandra Lee, Pola Rudnik, Henrike Vahldieck and Sven Wagner for their helpful comments on drafts of the present essay.

2 A comprehensive and perceptive reading along these lines is Alexander B. Clunas, ‘“A Double Word”: Writing and Justice in The Master of Ballantrae’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 28 (1993), 55-74. See also David M. Craig, ‘The Closed Form of The Master of Ballantrae’, Interpretations, 12 (1980), 40-52 (pp. 45 ff.); Douglas Gifford, ‘Stevenson and Scottish Fiction. The Importance of The Master of Ballantrae’, Stevenson and Victorian Scotland, ed. by Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1981), 62-87 (pp. 79 ff.); James F. Kilroy, ‘Narrative Techniques in The Master of Ballantrae’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 5 (1969), 98-106; Saverio Tomaiuolo, ‘Under Mackellar’s Eyes: Metanarrative Strategies in The Master of Ballantrae’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 3 (2006), 85-110 (pp. 90 ff.).

3 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 2nd ed., p. 158 ff.

4 Ansgar Nünning, ‘Unreliable, compared to what? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses’, in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext / Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr, 1999), 53-73 (p. 61).

5 Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005), pp. 66-97. Greta Olson and Per

Stevenson6.indb 60 23/10/2009 19:25

61Niederhoff

Hansen argue that Nünning is closer to Booth than his vigorous rhetoric would have us believe; they also make some interesting suggestions about distinguishing different kinds of unreliable narrators. See Greta Olson, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators’, Narrative, 11 (2003), 93-109; Per Krogh Hansen, ‘Reconsidering the Unreliable Narrator’, Semiotica, 165 (2007), 227-46.

6 Seymour Chatman, for instance, writes: ‘The narrator of Lolita, Humbert Humbert, whatever his character is, in my view, reliable.’ See Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978), p. 234.

7 E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Arnold, 1951), p. 112.

8 Arthur Mizener, ‘[Ford, Dowell, and the Sex Instinct]’, in Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Martin Stannard (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 322-25.

9 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54 (1946), 468-88.

10 Roland Barthes, ‘De l’œuvre au texte’, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1994), II, 1211-17 (p. 1215).

11 2 April 1889, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), VI, 277-278; henceforth cited as Letters.

12 See Stevenson’s ‘Note to The Master of Ballantrae’ in the appendix of the edition cited here, p. 226.

13 Elsewhere, I have a given a more comprehensive analysis of these features of ‘Mackellarese’ by comparing a passage from The Master of Ballantrae with a passage from Kidnapped. See Burkhard Niederhoff, Erzähler und Perspektive bei Robert Louis Stevenson (Würzburg: Königshausen, 1994), pp. 77-87.

14 On the complexities of this tale, see Jean-Pierre Naugrette, ‘Les aventures du roman: en derivant de Ballantrae’, Critique, 39 (1983), 365-78.

15 The Works: Pentland Edition, ed. by Edmund Gosse (London: Cassell, 1906-07), 20 vols., VIII, p. 308; henceforth cited in the text as Works.

16 Jenni Calder argues in a recent article that, in contrast to his predecessor Scott, Stevenson is especially sceptical when it comes to reconstructing and narrating history; see ‘Secrets and Lies:

Stevenson6.indb 61 23/10/2009 19:25

Stevenson’s Telling of the Past’, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, 20 (2007), 11-30. Calder also discusses The Master of Ballantrae in this essay, emphasizing the multiplicity and dissonance of voices in this novel (ibid., 21-25), thus following the third of the internal approaches to unreliability outlined in the introduction of the present essay.

17 ‘Mackellar’s identification with Henry’ is pointed out by Clunas, p. 59; it is also emphasized by Edwin Eigner, ‘The Master of Ballantrae as Elegiac Romance’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 40 (1994), 99-106.

18 Letters, 2 January 1886, V, 170-172 (p. 172).

19 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik I: Eine Aufsatzsammlung (1904-06; Gütersloh: Mohn, 1991), 8th ed.; for secular asceticism, see in particular pp. 134-39.

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63Beattie

Stormy nights and headless women: heterosexual conflict and desire in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson

Hilary J. Beattie

R. L. Stevenson has often been seen as an author whose concept

of romance excluded realistic treatment of love relations between

the sexes and who achieved ‘his best effects without the aid of the

ladies’.1 Yet it would be a mistake to neglect heterosexual forms of

narrative desire in his work, on the assumption that when present

(as they undeniably are, from first to last) they are merely bland

and conventional, or elided in favour of a more exciting, if covert,

homoeroticism. Here I intend to explore Stevenson’s professed

ambivalence over the treatment of heterosexual love, by way of

the twin images of my title, ‘stormy nights and headless women’.

These early but recurring fantasy structures suggest a darker

subtext to a merely superficial avoidance and also elucidate the

meaning of the homoerotic in Stevenson’s corpus.

Stevenson himself proclaimed (e.g. to the San Francisco

Examiner in 1888) that his preferred genre was the adventure

romance: ‘Women appear but little in my books because they are

not important elements in the side of life [. . .] which I myself

love most’, namely ‘clean open air adventure.’2 In later years he

tended to attribute his difficulties to fears of Victorian censor-

ship. To Colvin in 1892 he declared: ‘This is a poison bad world

for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it

by not having any women in it at all.’3 He later observed: ‘As for

women, I am no more in fear of them [. . .] but I am a little in fear

of grossness [. . .] The difficulty in a love yarn [. . .] is the dwelling

on one string [. . .] this all shoves towards grossness, possibly

even towards the far more damnable closeness [. . .] If ever I do

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a rape [. . .] you would hear a noise about my rape, and it should

be a man that did it.’(Letters, 7: 284.) This (excerpted) sequence

of ideas – women, fear, gross physicality, closeness, violence – is

striking, as is Stevenson’s stated, not entirely ironic, dislike of his

female characters. To his translator, Marcel Schwob, in 1890 he

wrote: ‘Vous ne détestez pas alors mes bonnes femmes? Moi, je

les déteste’ – in French in an otherwise English letter. (Letters, 6:

400.) To Colvin in 1891 he noted: ‘All my other bitches [besides

Uma in “The Beach of Falesá”] have been as ugly as sin, and like

[the sculptor’s] horse, mortes forbye.’ (Letters, 7: 113.) Striking

here is the word ‘dead’, decorously disguised in French. No

wonder that ten years earlier, when starting Treasure Island, he

had written: ‘No women in the story: Sam’s orders; and who so

blythe to obey? It’s awful fun, boys’ stories; you just indulge the

pleasure of your heart, that’s all.’ (Letters, 3: 225.)

This last sentence could have been the starting point for

much recent Stevenson scholarship, which has focused on the

homoerotic strain in his writing, as if to imply that disguised

homosexuality is responsible for this ambivalence about women.

Thus Elaine Showalter analyzed Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde as a case study of male hysteria and homosexual panic,

‘the discovery and resistance of the homosexual self [whose] [.

. .] romance is conveyed through men’s names, men’s bodies,

men’s psyches.’4 Wayne Koestenbaum actually posited homo-

sexual attraction as central in Stevenson’s collaborations with his

stepson, [Samuel] Lloyd Osbourne, which effectively started with

Treasure Island and culminated in the all-male, sexually sug-

gestive The Ebb-Tide.5 Oliver S. Buckton has proposed that the

figure of the re-animated corpse, or the body in the box, which

surfaces in many of Stevenson’s fictions, from The Suicide Club

to The Wrong Box, also represents secret, homoerotic desire. The

corpse (here always a male body) is a reminder of the body ‘as a

site of illicit pleasure, specifically “unspeakable” sexual practices

between men.’6

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65Beattie

The problem with such readings is that they may overlook

the often highly conflicted treatment of heterosexual desire

in Stevenson’s work, and the ways in which this helps, contra-

puntally, to explain the flight to the male love object. The major

exception to this trend is Jean-Pierre Naugrette, who has among

other things delineated Stevenson’s ‘maternal’ landscapes,

peopled with phallic mothers and dangerous seductresses, both

actual and symbolic.7 My title refers to fearful, sexually charged

fantasies which are present very early in Stevenson’s work. I

shall trace their evolution through all types of writing (poetry,

fiction, essays and letters), though my most detailed discussion

will be of the early poem ‘Stormy Nights’, a group of letters from

the 1870s, and the two horror stories ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The

Bodysnatcher’.

I shall also draw on contemporary psychoanalytic theory, to

elucidate the relationship of these disturbing heterosexual fan-

tasies to Stevenson’s homoerotic themes. Specifically, I propose

that the underlying dynamic in these writings is not so much the

panicked discovery of homosexual desire, oppressed by female

demands. Rather, it is the kind of anxiety described by Lionel

Ovesey and Ethel Person in their theory of ‘pseudo-homosexual-

ity’.8 Briefly, they posit that an overly dependent but fundamen-

tally heterosexual male may be insufficiently dis-identified from

the powerful mother during his psycho-sexual development,

resulting in a fragile sense of masculinity and, sometimes, gender

identity. Such a man desires adult women sexually but also fears

them as dominating and castrating, and may react with retalia-

tory rage, or flight, to any perceived threat. He is apt therefore

to seek refuge, defensively, in other males, often father figures

or admired contemporaries, whose sexual potency can supply

his lack. I shall demonstrate that such dynamics can be clearly

traced in much of Stevenson’s work.

The evolution of heterosexual narratives in Stevenson’s opus

can be divided into three periods, the first comprising the early

Stevenson6.indb 65 23/10/2009 19:25


work up to 1880; then the 1880s, which coincided with the begin-

ning of his married life; and finally the 1890s, when he had

escaped into the Pacific. In the early period, I start with ‘Stormy

Nights’, written sometime after Stevenson’s discovery of Walt

Whitman’s joyously physical Leaves of Grass in 1871. This poem

can of course be situated in Stevenson’s numerous accounts of the

night-time terrors he suffered in childhood, in consequence of the

‘high strung religious ecstasies’ and fears of hell and damnation

inculcated in him by his well-meaning nurse. These inner terrors

were often personified by actual storms raging without: ‘the howl

of the wind [. . .] the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the

shuddering silent pauses when the storm’s heart stands dread-

fully still for a moment’. And the ‘perfect impersonation’ of the

storm was a ‘horseman riding past with his cloak about his head’,

over and over again, ‘all night long’, while the terrified child cried

and prayed and held his breath, in a ‘state of miserable exalta-

tion’. (Letters, 2: 66.) These nocturnal storms show up in much

of Stevenson’s later prose and poetry, e.g. (in milder form) in the

poem ‘Windy Nights’ from A Child’s Garden of Verses. In the

metaphorical ‘Stormy Nights’, unpublished in the author’s life-

time, the opening mood is one of defiant, Whitmanesque zeal, as

the poet both confesses and attempts to exorcise and repress the

troubles of his ‘perished childhood’. Then he describes the chief

trouble; how the young boy, in bed, experiments nightly with ‘evil

things’ and mysterious ‘possibilities of sin’.

And how my spirit beat

The cage of its compulsive purity;

How – my eyes fixed,

My shot lip tremulous between my fingers

I fashioned for myself new modes of crime,

Created for myself with pain and labour

The evil that the cobwebs of society,

The comely secrecies of education,

Had made an itching mystery to mewards.

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67Beattie

After this barely veiled description of masturbation, that

scourge of Victorian boyhoods, there breaks the horrific storm,

with its ‘cloak-wrapt horseman’ repeatedly pounding by, ‘Like

some one riding with a pardon, and ever baffled, ever shut from

passage.’ Here the storm-driven horseman seems to represent

not only the forces of punishment, or pardon withheld, but

also the terrifying compulsion of mounting and ebbing, male

sexual excitement, until the child’s ‘hard breathing’ is gradually

released in sleep. The following two verses depict escape, first as

a solitary Indian, revelling in open-air adventure and his quest

for the meaning of life, yet still writhing in terror at night on his

bed of leaves; then as an adult, a Greek, seeking peace and safety

in the company and talk of his fellow men, ‘free from inordinate

cravings’.9

So what are these ‘inordinate cravings’, and why are they

so dangerous? Stevenson, like his father before him, always

used day-dreaming and self-storytelling as an antidote to his

night terrors. ‘When there was no high wind [. . .] I told myself

romances in which I played the hero [. . .] usually these fanta-

sies embraced the adventures of a lifetime, full of far journeys

and Homeric battles [. . .] They had no reference to religion [.

. .] and as far back as I can remember, they bore always some

relation to women, and Eros and Anteros [love and hate] must

always equally have divided my allegiance. And lastly they would

be concluded always with a heroic, and sometimes with a cruel

death. I never left myself till I was dead.’10 In these still interludes

between the storms, sexual terror is mastered in story. Women

are the objects of desire, but the romantic, literary quest is one

of extreme ambivalence, coupled with the man’s inevitable sub-

mission in death. This scenario finds gruesome expression in the

undated but probably early poem ‘The Daughter of Herodias’, a

defensively comic treatment of the Victorians’ favourite femme

fatale.11 This time the night is still and hot, and the voluptuous,

murderous Salome (daughter of an equally murderous mother)

Stevenson6.indb 67 23/10/2009 19:25


is haunted by the vision of her male victim’s head. It lies on a

salver, at her feet upon her bed, a head ‘sallow and horrible and

dead [. . .] watching her, horrible and sly’. The hallucination, with

its uneasy, mutual seeing, is jokingly attributed to indigestion

(the result of greed), but the sexual partners seem doomed to tor-

ment each other, sado-masochistically, in perpetuity. The only

men who are safe are the three already castrated eunuch slaves

who rhythmically labour to pleasure the woman by fanning her.

This may be Stevenson’s first male corpse, and perhaps John

the Baptist points forward to that rash young man later found

dead in bed, murdered, the voyeuristic victim of two voluptuous

women, in The Suicide Club (1878).

This preoccupation with women, sexual desire, beheading

(castration) and death surfaces in letters Stevenson wrote in

1874, after being taken by his first love, Fanny Sitwell, to see the

Elgin marbles in the British Museum. He reacted with palpable

shock to their representation of the Three Fates, the great mother

goddesses of love and death. It was the headlessness of the three

huge women that most impressed Stevenson, and I excerpt some

of the freely associative ramblings (to both his cousin, Bob, and to

Fanny Sitwell) that followed: ‘…the three Fates are unspeakable

[. . .] I just cried: these three women are so hellish calm and can

see so far away, can’t they? [. . .] I’m damned glad to have seen

them; and I think I’m glad they’ve lost their heads, I don’t think

any faces could be worthy of those beautiful, meaning bodies.’

(Letters, 2: 64-65.) Later, after obtaining a framed photograph

of them, he mused: ‘… those [. . .] draperies are drawn over a

wonderful greatness of body instinct with sex; I do not see a line

in them that could be a line in a man. And yet [. . .] they are

not women for us [. . .] we do not desire to see their great eyes

troubled with our passions, or the great impassive members con-

torted with any hope or pain or pleasure [. . .] [But at] worst, shall

I not be able to lay my head on the great knees of the middle Fate

[. . .] great knees that awe me and yet make me mad with desire [.

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69Beattie

. .] and go to sleep?’ (Letters, 2: 70-72.) He later fantasised about

these great, deep-breasted women living, austere, rigid and pas-

sionless, on some ‘lost island in the pagan seas’. And yet ‘if one

could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with

passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be

a small thing to die?’ (Letters, 2: 76-77.)

These letters (from a series dated late October/early November

1874, to Fanny Sitwell, that also contain the above, anguished

description of the hated storms and head-swathed horseman of

‘Stormy Nights’) seem to evidence both overwhelming attraction

and fear with regard to the female body. There is an associated

fantasy of sex with powerful women as engulfing and dangerous

to the needy, dependent male. Women are self-sufficient, always

more ‘substantive’ than men, and all-seeing (even without heads)

whereas men are not men without women (Stevenson cannot

think of Hercules without his wife Deianera). Better therefore

that such phallic women be castrated or headless, their naked-

ness draped, safely remote and immobile. Otherwise they may

cause the immediate death of the man who even once passion-

ately kisses and arouses them, or who rashly lays his head on

their knees, to fall asleep forever. These letters, with their free

fall of free associations, also contain noteworthy references to

well known cases of deadly women. Deianera was responsible for

the agonizing death of the unfaithful Hercules, by sending him a

robe impregnated with a love philtre that proved to be poison-

ous. Stevenson praises here the ‘Song of Deborah and Barak’

(Judges 5),in which Jael, a married woman, lures Barak’s enemy

Sisera to her tent, kills him by hammering a tent peg through his

temple and afterwards cuts off his head. (Letters, 2: 68-69.) And

there is the sorceress Medea, with her trail of dismembered or

boiled-alive male victims. Stevenson had once addressed Fanny

Sitwell as Medea, begging her to kill him or make him young

again, but increasingly in this period he called her Madonna or

even ‘mother of my soul’, and cast himself in the safer role of

Stevenson6.indb 69 23/10/2009 19:25


little child or ‘friend and son and priest’. (Letters, 1: 374; 2: 94,

96-97, 103, 120.)

Such fear and ambivalence show up repeatedly in Stevenson’s

work of this early period, in examples too numerous to cite. In

‘An Old Song’ (1877) the utterly ineffectual, martyred hero is

betrayed and spurned by the now-married woman he still loves,

a scenario echoed in the early fable ‘The Touchstone’, where the

desired, deceitful woman proves to be ‘dead’ and empty behind

her smiling mask. In ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ (1879) the inad-

equate hero-narrator distances himself from his love by empha-

sizing over and over that she is by now long dead, and depicts

his climactic kiss as ‘from a man soon to die to a woman already

dead’. In ‘Will o’ the Mill’ (1877), the cautious hero renounces

love, marriage and life itself, and the rejected woman marries

another only to be punished by death in childbirth. Will is res-

cued finally by his ‘only friend’ and father, Death. In the essay

‘Virginibus Puerisque’ (1876), a strangely anxious pontification

on marriage coming from a 25-year-old bachelor, matrimony is

represented as a ‘perilous remedy’ for loneliness; a ‘grave’ and

‘terrifying’ step, a ‘field of battle’ that leads only to death. And

sometimes fear and resentment explode against the woman. ‘A

man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often

scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side of

man…’12 In the violent coming-of-age fable ‘The House of Eld’

(around 1874) Jack kills all three parental figures with his magic

sword, but it is the treacherous ‘mother’ whose body is severed

‘through the midst’ with a sideways swing of the blade.

This note of retaliatory violence brings me to the second

period, the 1880s (perhaps not coincidentally the beginning of

Stevenson’s married life with Fanny Osbourne). Now there is

a sudden eruption of dark and devilish imagery, often around

women and sometimes involving gender fluidity and merging,

as well as decapitation and dismemberment. All this is true of

‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Bodysnatcher’, both of 1881. ‘Thrawn

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71Beattie

Janet’, the Scots tale of a young minister who rashly employs

as housekeeper an older woman seen to be a witch, is one of

Stevenson’s masterpieces, even if he expressed doubt as to its

universal significance.13 ‘The Bodysnatcher’, about a medical

student turned grave robber, was condemned by Stevenson

himself as offensive and ‘horrid’. Indeed, after its first printing

in 1884 he did not include it in any of the collections of short

stories published in his lifetime. (Letters, 3: 204; 5: 41 n.2, 52.)

It has interesting affinities, however, with his recurring adoles-

cent nightmare of the double life, described in ‘A Chapter on

Dreams’ (1888). Here, an Edinburgh medical student witnesses

‘the abhorred dexterity of surgeons’ by day, and spends every

night, in wet clothes, wearily climbing the stairs of his lodgings,

brushing past an endless, dreary procession of solitary men and

women coming down (surely a sexual dream, as hinted by the

word ‘wet’ repeated three times).14

Both these stories (which are in many respects the same story)

evidence the sexual fantasies hinted at in ‘Stormy Nights’ and

the musings on the three Fates. Both feature inexperienced,

unattached young men, The Revd. Soulis and the student Fettes,

who are overconfident, even arrogant, in their dealings with the

world. Both are led by an older man or men (Soulis by the local

laird, Fettes by MacFarlane and Mr K.) into compromising, sin-

ful or criminal relationships with sexual overtones, and uncanny

danger invades their solitary lodgings. The experienced women

characters, the licentious Janet McClour and Jane Galbraith,

the murdered prostitute, both embody the dangers of unbridled

sexuality, and therefore have to die. Yet they both hover uncer-

tainly between life and death. The locals are suspicious of the

undead Janet with her twisted neck; and Fettes, who has had

sexual relations with Jane only the day before, cannot believe

she is really dead. The dead Jane is doubled at the end with the

exhumed corpse of the blameless old farmer’s wife, but both have

their clothing or shrouds pulled off, exposing their naked limbs

Stevenson6.indb 71 23/10/2009 19:25


to the students’ prurient gaze. Janet’s clothing is ripped off her

back by the local women and the minister takes her home in her

‘sark’, while her ‘duds’ are strewn around the room in which he

finds her hanging dead. We are reminded of the semi-draped

Fates, whose stony bodies are still ‘instinct with sex’ and whose

absent heads can still stare back, Medusa-like, at the shuddering

male viewer (Soulis takes a ‘cauld grue’ as he looks at Janet or

the ‘black man’).15

Both stories feature dismemberment and decapitation. The

decapitation is implicit in the case of the dissected Jane, but is

spelled out in that of her male counterpart, the blackmailing,

murdered Gray. His head (like John the Baptist’s on a salver) is

given for dissection to the covetous, greedy Richardson. Janet’s

head is almost twisted off her body, her face grimacing like a

corpse before laying-out, even before she is found hanging from

a thread. (This image is an old one in Scottish folklore, but it

also recalls the three Fates, who spin and then cut the thread of

Life.)16 Finally, the climactic scenes of retribution in both stories

occur at night, with torrential storms and impenetrable dark-

ness, preceded in ‘Thrawn Janet’ by uncanny heat and calm (as

in ‘The Daughter of Herodias’). And what terrifies the young men

in both stories is the horrific suggestion of gender fluidity and

merging, at the very peak of excitement. Janet is revealed to have

been inhabited by the ‘Black Man’ or Devil, while the shrouded

body of her counterpart, the farmer’s wife, grows and swells like

some monstrous phallus, until shown to be that of another ‘black

man’, the dead and dissected Gray, the bodysnatchers’ alter ego.

And we recall that ‘snatch’ is a slang term for the female genitalia,

wherein men are fatally snared.17 At the climax of both stories the

light is suddenly extinguished and the young men run screaming

for their lives through the dark and rain, while the bodysnatch-

ers’ horse gallops off, its ghastly rider now dead. Both Soulis and

Fettes are henceforth effectively dead men, their celibate lives

haunted and barren.

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73Beattie

It is surely no coincidence that it was in precisely this period

that Stevenson found the formula of the all male adventure

romance for which he became famous. Coming-of-age quest

stories like Treasure Island (1881) and Kidnapped (1886) banish

women to the margins and reinforce male solidarity and identity

in the face of the threats they pose, even if the young heroes may

still sometimes be ineffectual and the older men treacherous or

misled. (Recall that the hapless Fettes tells MacFarlane: ‘You and

K. between you [. . .] you’ll make a man of me’, when in fact he

is unmanned through their machinations.) By the same token,

physicality and sexual excitement could be transposed into the

safer male realm, avoiding the highly conflicted sexual scripts

around women that bedevilled, so to speak, any close treatment

of relations between the sexes. Otherwise, the excluded female

body had to be defensively objectified, distanced or mutilated,

even if it is the man who sometimes ends up dead. In this context

one may recall Stevenson’s uneasy fascination with Poe, espe-

cially his tales of demonic, dead women resurrected. Stevenson

(1875) had explicitly noted that Poe’s ‘Berenice’ (whose dement-

ed hero robs his undead cousin’s corpse of her teeth) touched a

personal ‘chord’, though one ‘that had better be left alone’. He

also dwelled on the psychological realism of ‘Ligeia’, whose final

scene (where the shrouded corpse of the fair lady Rowena stirs,

grows and is horrifyingly transformed into the hero’s lost love,

the black-haired Ligeia) is an obvious prototype for the climax of

‘The Bodysnatcher’.18

Stevenson did attempt love stories, even in the 1880s. He

partially coped with ambivalence and sexual anxiety through the

device of split female characters. Thus, an older, helpful woman

can protect the timid, ineffectual hero against the dangerous,

often younger, female. In Prince Otto (1883) the prince is aided

by the older, sexually experienced Countess von Rosen to master

his fear of his domineering young wife, who has reduced him to

impotence, both personal and political, such that he describes his

Stevenson6.indb 73 23/10/2009 19:25


love for her as ‘slavish and unerect’. She at one point stabs the

virile Baron Gondremark, her ally and lover, and is dubbed ‘quite

a Judith’ in consequence. But the Countess can only declare her

own love for Otto in a scene where she is safely disguised as a

young man. This motif is also used in The Black Arrow (1883),

where the heroine, Joanna Sedley, at first allays Dick Shelton’s

fear and dislike of women (he esteems only the one who was

‘burned for a witch and the wearing of men’s clothes’) by being

disguised as a male comrade. After she is suddenly revealed to

him as a woman, in a reverse gender transformation, she too has

to be doubled with a female helper, the bossy and capable Alicia

Risingham. Alicia in turn is at one point disguised as a man, and

resolutely takes charge of Dick’s love affair as Joanna recedes

into the background. And the inept Dick is ultimately dismissed

by his virile, if deformed, double, Richard Crookback, in the

contemptuous double-entendre: ‘He will not rise [. . .] [he] hath

a capon’s heart.’

Stevenson throughout his career (and life) seems to have been

fascinated by paired older and younger women; mother and

daughter, aunt and niece, nurse and mother, older and younger

sisters. A mother/daughter pair shows up as early as his 1874

essay on the preacher, John Knox, who denounced women but

finally married, at a late age, the young daughter of a still married

devotee, who came to live with them.19 Yet the fictional device of

doubled women came back to bite him, so to speak, in his Gothic

tale, ‘Olalla’ (1885), probably his least ambiguous venture into

the topic of sexual passion but one that he repeatedly wrote off

as ‘false’. As I have demonstrated in detail elsewhere, ‘Olalla’ is

the repressed, female double of the all-male Jekyll and Hyde

and, like it, was conceived in a nightmare.20 Here, as in ‘Thrawn

Janet’, an inadequate (wounded) hero is delivered by an older

man (his doctor) into the domain of a sexually licentious older

woman with impaired speech, who is tabooed by the locals. She

is doubled with her seeming opposite, her beautiful, articulate

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75Beattie

and pious daughter, with whom the hero falls passionately in

love but who resists his advances. But both women turn out to

embody the overwhelming dangers of sexual desire to the hap-

less male. At the climax the seemingly imbecilic and innocuous

mother is suddenly revealed as a ravenous vampire when she

bites the hero’s bleeding hand (wounded in an act of symbolic

defloration), but the virginal daughter declares herself infected

with the same atavistic appetites. Note that these revelations are

preceded and symbolised by a horrific nocturnal storm, where

the howling of the ‘black wind’, mingling with bestial, savage

cries suggestive of some nightmare primal scene, shocks and ter-

rifies the shuddering hero.

In the third period of his career, the 1890s, as well as writing

tales with only masculine protagonists, like The Wrecker and

The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson made a conscious effort to overcome

his ‘fear’ of his women characters, though in ways that betray

the old, lingering conflicts, especially in stories with Scottish set-

tings. The unfinished Weir of Hermiston is essentially a reprise

of ‘Olalla’ in a more mature and realistic vein, with sexual inter-

est divided between the paired characters of aunt and niece, both

named Kirstie. Desire is most tellingly depicted in the seductive

older woman, another housekeeper, into whose isolated domain

the hero, Archie, has been consigned by his tyrannical father. But

the niece’s dangerousness is suggested by the fact that she was to

have been deflowered and impregnated by the hero’s evil stand-

in (who is then murdered by the hero).21

In David Balfour (1892), the sequel to Kidnapped, the women

are again split, and David’s love, Catriona, is soon overshadowed

by the witty, strong-willed Barbara Grant, who takes over the

management of their affair, rather like Alicia Risingham in The

Black Arrow. Catriona is effectively a heterosexual replacement

for the Alan Breck of Kidnapped, but she is a stereotypical figure

and the scenes between David and Alan here have a poignancy

and physical intimacy that far outweigh those between her and

Stevenson6.indb 75 23/10/2009 19:25


David. Eventually the virile Alan, himself impervious to female

charms, has to help the ambivalent, immature David manage

the girl, even lending him strength by sharing a single bed with

him. Stevenson admitted that the love affair was so ‘correct’ that

it ‘might be read out to a mothers’ meeting – or a daughters’

meeting’. (Letters, 7: 284.) Most confusing of all is the episode

in Leiden where David, finally alone with Catriona, passes her

off as his sister, and is consumed with guilt and fear as he strug-

gles against admitting, let alone acting on, his own desire. The

atmosphere of danger and taboo here resembles nothing so

much as the ‘unmarketable’ dream described in ‘A Chapter on

Dreams’ (1888), where a man is left alone with his young step-

mother, tortured by love but keeping a distance, terrified that

she will denounce him for the murder of his father.22 Catriona

herself wishes repeatedly that she were a man and claims to have

become one at the end, when David accidentally wounds her with

his sword (another symbolic defloration) while fighting with her

father. Their actual marriage is passed over so un-explicitly that

one hardly realises it has taken place.

At first sight, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1892), set in the more sexu-

ally open and perhaps less class-conscious South Seas, might

seem the one instance in which Stevenson was able to transcend

the sexual conflicts of his earlier fiction. But on closer inspection

it proves to be a reworking of ‘Thrawn Janet’ in a more benign

key. Wiltshire, another over-confident, ignorant newcomer to a

superstitious community, immediately allows himself to be mar-

ried off, by a duplicitous older man, to a local woman who proves

to be tabooed. Uma (first seen half naked, in a wetted ‘sark’) is

young and pretty, but she is doubled with her sinister old, black

clad mother who mumbles and hums to herself, and the ‘wed-

ding’ is performed by another ‘black man’, the fake cleric, Black

Jack. Wiltshire, unlike Soulis, successfully defies and outwits the

resident ‘Tiapolo’, Case, in his forest lair with its painted, faked

devils. But in the climactic scene, again at night, Wiltshire at first

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mistakes Uma for a ‘devil woman’, and she is hit during his fight

with Case (in an echo of David Balfour). Now at last the treacher-

ous older man is vanquished, in an utterly orgiastic scene where

Wiltshire repeatedly stabs/penetrates Case, fainting on his dead

body with his head on Case’s mouth. He wakes only to stab him

again, a climax that must also owe something to the cannibalistic

notion of drawing strength from dead enemies. But Wiltshire

remains, in a sense, permanently tabooed, by his union with a

non-white woman (who becomes so ‘powerful big’ that she could

vanquish any man).

That Stevenson’s fantasies about overpowering females and

feminised men pervaded his fiction to the end, can be seen in

his other unfinished novel, St. Ives. Its hero, a Napoleonic war

prisoner in Edinburgh, is given the woman’s name, Anne, and

is doubled with his evil cousin, Alain, who is an effeminate fop.

The action consists of the hero’s ambivalent flights away from,

and then back towards, the Scottish girl with whom he falls in

love, aided by a succession of male helpers. At one point he both

reveals and neutralises the overwhelming importance of female

caretakers in his early life. After his mother’s execution during

the Revolution, he was cared for in prison by multiple mothers,

a succession of aristocratic ‘belles mamans’, each of whom was

led out in turn, smiling, to the guillotine and decapitated.23 And,

lastly, the ‘real heroine’ of one planned romance, The Young

Chevalier, was to have been named Marie-Salomé des Saintes

Maries – a name which surely represents the very embodiment

of murderous sexuality, protectively sandwiched between multi-

ple, maternal virginities! (Letters, 7: 284-285.)

To sum up, Stevenson’s treatment of sexuality is too complex

and multivalent to be neatly subsumed under the rubric of the

homoerotic and the homo-social. It is only by using a historical,

contextual method, aided by modern psychoanalytic theories

concerning male sexual desire, that one can explicate the evolu-

tion of love themes in his work, and more accurately assess the

Stevenson6.indb 77 23/10/2009 19:25


meanings of his proclaimed ambivalence over tackling them.

How successfully he would have done so in his later work, it is

impossible to say. What is certain is that Stevenson continued

to struggle with conflicts over ‘procreation’ and ‘heredity’, social

propriety versus ‘maenadic’ sexuality, and the damning effects of

religion on sex education, to the very end of his life. And almost

at the moment of his death he claimed to have ‘nothing in [his]

foolish elderly head but love stories’. (Letters, 8: 362, 365, 399.)

Notes

1 Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, in Century Magazine, April 1888; reprinted in Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (Library of America: New York, 1984), 1231-1255 (p. 1252).

2 Anne Roller Issler, Happier for his Presence: San Francisco and Robert Louis Stevenson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949), p. 160.

3 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-1995), 7:231; henceforth cited in the text as Letters.

4 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), pp. 107-108.

5 Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 145-151.

6 Oliver S. Buckton, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative and the Colonial Body (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), pp. 35-66.

7 Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Robert Louis Stevenson: L’Aventure et son Double (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1987), pp. 41-44, 95-98, 101-102, 155-161.

8 Lionel Ovesey, Homosexuality and Pseudohomosexuality (New York: Science House, 1969), pp. 32-51, 56-65; Ethel Spector Person, The Sexual Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 94-97.

9 Robert Louis Stevenson: Collected Poems, ed. by Janet Adam Smith (2nd. Ed., New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 86-88, 462-463; henceforth cited as Poems. The ambiguous but potentially transgressive meaning

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of the excerpt becomes clearer if the fourth line is read with a pause after ‘tremulous’. It should be recalled that Whitman, who ‘tumbled the world upside down’ for Stevenson in late adolescence, was similarly transgressive. According to Harold Bloom (‘The Real Me’, New York Review of Books April 26, 1984, p.4) ‘this celebratory mode of masturbation, whether read metaphorically or literally, remains the genuine scandal of Whitman’s poetry’.

10 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Memoirs of Himself’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 29, 145-168 (p. 155).

11 Poems, pp. 95-96, 465.

12 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 25, 1-20 (p. 17).

13 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Note for “The Merry Men”’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 8, xv-xvi (p. xv).

14 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 30, 41-53 (pp. 43-44).

15 Stevenson ‘frightened [himself] to death’ with ‘Thrawn Janet’; see Letters, 3: 189. For another discussion of sexual conflict and repression in this tale, see Burkhard Niederhoff, Erzähler und Perspektive bei Robert Louis Stevenson (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), pp. 71-72. The career of the licentious young Janet, the high-kilted temptress of an earlier curate, is touched on in Stevenson’s unfinished ‘Heathercat’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 16, 143-164 (pp. 149-150).

16 The body of James Hogg’s Justified Sinner is similarly found hanging, from a hay-rope too brittle to bear weight. For other examples, see Coleman O. Parsons, ‘Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in “Thrawn Janet”’, Studies in Philology, 43 (1946), 551-571 (pp. 562-563).

17 The O.E.D. records ‘snatch’ in the sense of ‘female pudenda’, in written form only in the 20th century. But as ‘trap’ or ‘snare’, as well as a term for a quick, illicit sexual encounter with a woman, it goes back to the late 16th.

18 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Works of Edgar Allan Poe’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 28, 178-185 (p. 181).

19 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘John Knox and his Relations to Women’ (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 27, 202-244 (pp. 230-233). Stevenson admitted to envying Knox ‘his godly females all leaving their husbands to follow after him’; see Letters, 2: 69.

Stevenson6.indb 79 23/10/2009 19:25


20 Hilary J. Beattie, ‘Dreaming, doubling and gender in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson: The strange case of “Olalla”’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 2 (2005), 10-32.

21 Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, ed. by Catherine Kerrigan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp. xxxii-xxxiv.

22 ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, pp. 47-50.

23 Robert Louis Stevenson, St. Ives (London: Heinemann, 1924), Tusitala, 15, pp. 154-155. In the period 1893-1894, when St. Ives was being written, Stevenson was vigorously protesting (in letters to the Times and elsewhere) against the ‘detestable felony’ of taking female heads during the Samoan wars; see Roslyn Jolly, Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire and the Author’s Profession (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 135-136. Did these events stir up an old obsession?

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81Hirsch

The rejection of dichotomous thinking in Stevenson’s literary essays

Gordon Hirsch

Stevenson’s book reviews and essays on authors were written

mostly in the 1870s, when he was a young man in his twenties,

and before his literary career had taken off – certainly before he

had written anything of great note. Nevertheless, a twenty-first

century reader, familiar with Stevenson’s fiction, readily discov-

ers in these literary essays a Stevensonian cast of mind – bal-

anced in its judgments, critical but at the same time sympathetic,

generally able to allow that there are two sides to most important

questions and that individuals are an inevitable mixture of posi-

tive and negative features. Such qualities of mind in the essays

might come as no surprise to a reader who, for example, recog-

nises how problematic Stevenson makes the judgment between

the Durrisdeer brothers, James and Henry, in his novel, The

Master of Ballantrae – how difficult Stevenson makes it for the

reader to side unequivocally with one brother against the other,

since each has a claim on our sympathies. Or in Strange Case

of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which of the three main characters

has the strongest claim on truth-telling? Still, it is notable that

this openness and broad-mindedness figure as prominently in

Stevenson’s early literary essays as in his fiction.

One reason Stevenson’s discussions of authors and fictional

characters – those created by others as well as those created

by himself – are especially interesting stems from his refusal to

isolate the bad from the good in these figures, for he clearly is

not inclined toward the simplifications of ‘dichotomous think-

ing’. One might, of course, find other 19th-century exponents

of notions similar to what I am characterizing as Stevenson’s

Stevenson6.indb 81 23/10/2009 19:25


rejection of ‘dichotomous thinking’. For example, it shares some

features with Keats’s admiration for Shakespeare’s ‘negative

capability’, with John Stuart Mill’s argument in favour of the

generative clash of opposing ideas in a society characterised by

freedom of thought and discussion, and with Matthew Arnold’s

view that his culture required a healthy infusion of Hellenism to

counteract its restrictive Hebraism. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

has argued recently that George Eliot’s complex perspectival

system in Middlemarch so well depicts conflicting systems of

discourse that a simple and straightforward choice between

opposites is impossible; Ermarth believes that Eliot derived her

particular ‘nondualist vision’ from Feuerbach and Spinoza.1 I

regard Stevenson’s rejection of dichotomous thinking as prima-

rily a psychological phenomenon, interweaving cognition and

emotion, rather than as a purely logical or philosophical one. To

describe the phenomenon in Stevenson I employ recent research

in cognitive psychology.

Psychiatrists and psychologists whose practice of therapy is

informed by cognitive psychology research, such as Aaron T. Beck

and his followers, call attention to a particular habit of thought

which produces cognitive distortion: ‘Dichotomous thinking

is the tendency to evaluate experiences in terms of mutually

exclusive categories (e. g., good or bad, success or failure, trust-

worthy or deceitful) rather than seeing experiences as falling

along continua. The effect of this “black-or-white” thinking is

to force extreme interpretations on events that would normally

fall in the intermediate range of a continuum, since there are no

intermediate categories’ in dichotomous thinking.2 Symptoms of

psychopathology aside, in ordinary life this sort of cognitive dis-

tortion can be highly problematic. Failing to recognise that there

are a number of positions in between extremes impedes problem

solving, cooperation, and negotiation. It focuses instead on rapid

categorization, difference, and opposition rather than facilitating

a complex recognition of similarity and difference. Dichotomous

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83Hirsch

thinking is the parent of missed opportunities and inflexibility,

and it poisons interpersonal relationships. In the political realm,

Americans, in particular, have in the past few years encountered

evidence demonstrating just how limiting black-or-white, all-

or-nothing thinking, or magnification/minimization can be.

Stevenson’s reluctance to dichotomise in his discussions of ‘men

and books’ in his early reviews and essays anticipates his own

future practice in fiction and makes him a valuable literary critic

as well as a complex and insightful author.3

In keeping with the ‘RLS 2008’ conference’s emphasis on

‘European Stevenson’, the discussion that follows focuses on

Stevenson’s responses to François Villon and Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe. Towards the end of the paper, however, I will briefly

discuss some of Stevenson’s other treatments of authors and

literary characters, where a similar rejection of dichotomous

thinking may be observed.

n

Originally published in Cornhill Magazine, August 1877,

Stevenson’s paper on ‘François Villon, Student, Poet, and

Housebreaker’ unpacks the ambivalence figured in its title.4 The

essay is a response to the recently published Étude biographique

sur François Villon written by Auguste Longnon, a biographical

study based on official records and documents Longnon found

in the national archives.5 Longnon’s was an important project,

and it is frequently cited even today by Villon scholars. Stevenson

offers this assessment of the impact of Longnon’s book: ‘A lit-

tle while ago Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was

revived for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived

with a vengeance in the detection of his misdemeanours’ as these

were brought to light by Longnon’s archival research (Works, IV,

pp. 204-05).6

Stevenson’s essay follows Longnon’s book fairly closely, hew-

Stevenson6.indb 83 23/10/2009 19:25


ing generally to the order of the biography, and quoting or para-

phrasing bits and snippets freely. He deftly characterises Villon’s

‘gang’ as something more like an association of ‘independent

malefactors, socially intimate, and occasionally joining together

for some serious operation, just as modern stockjobbers form a

syndicate for an important loan’ (p. 221). Paralleling Longnon,

Stevenson recounts a number of Villon’s burglaries and thefts, as

well as arrests and periods of imprisonment followed by release.

As the title of the essay underlines, Stevenson is fascinated by

the idea that Villon was at the same time a student (he repeatedly

refers to him as a Master of Arts from the University of Paris), an

influential major poet, and a housebreaker and thief. Villon is a

‘ragged, blackguard city poet with a smack of the Paris student,

and a smack of the Paris street arab’ (p. 234), and ‘the world to

which he introduces us is [. . .] blackguardly and bleak. Paris

swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death’ (p. 238).

As is typical of his essays on authors, Stevenson is as much

interested in Villon’s personality and biography as in his writing,

though he certainly recognises Villon’s importance in literary

history. Attracted to Villon’s ‘callous pertinent way of looking

upon the sordid and ugly sides of life’ (p. 238), Stevenson praises

his ‘writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque. [. . .]

This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age and country,

and initiated modern literature for France. [. . .] Out of him flows

much of Rabelais; and through Rabelais [. . .] a deep, permanent,

and growing inspiration’ for French literature (pp. 237-38).7

Praise and criticism sometimes blur in Stevenson’s assessment

of Villon’s poetry: he notes ‘its unrivalled insincerity. [. . .] He

comes up with a whine, and runs away with a whoop and his

finger to his nose’ (p. 239). Villon may first elicit pathos from

his reader, but then the Testament becomes ‘one long-drawn

epical grimace, pulled by a merry-andrew, who has found a

certain despicable eminence over human respect and human

affections by perching himself astride upon the gallows’ (p. 240).

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85Hirsch

The Testament is thus both an ‘admirable and despicable per-

formance’ (p. 244). Villon’s most sincere emotions are ‘a deep

and somewhat snivelling conviction of the transitory nature of

this life and the pity and horror of death’ (p. 241). His writings

manifest ‘an undisguised envy of those richer than himself’,

which Stevenson interprets as Villon’s attempt to justify theft

and wrongdoing (p. 240). In fact, Stevenson writes, Villon repre-

sents the kind of unattractive, covetous poor person that Victor

Hugo regarded as the ‘mauvais pauvre [. . .], the first wicked

sans-culotte’ (p. 241). Villon might seem ‘mighty pathetic and

beseeching here in the street, but I would not go down a dark

road with him for a large consideration’ (p. 241).

Stevenson is fascinated not only by the biographical evidence

that Longnon uncovers but also by the mysteries he identi-

fies regarding Villon’s life – the uncertainties present in the

biographical record: ‘How or when he died, whether decently

in bed or trussed up to a gallows, remains a riddle’ (p. 244).

Many matters, Stevenson notes, ‘still remain in darkness, in

spite of M. Longnon’s diligent rummaging among archives’ (p.

234). Furthermore, the use by Villon and his acquaintances of

multiple aliases and pseudonyms surely must be regarded with

suspicion: ‘A ship is not to be trusted that sails under so many

colours’ (p. 216). Some of the perplexities and ambiguities noted

by Stevenson reverberate in modern readings of Villon, although

critics today tend to be still more reluctant to judge the poet. An

important recent study by Jane H. M. Taylor describes Villon as

‘a highly conscious poet, playing with the fiction of the poet and

the pen. [. . .] Villon, in other words, has interwoven levels of

discourse in ways which are profoundly self-subverting.’8 He

represents himself, for example, as ‘a divided poet-lover, at once

infatuated and aware of the absurdities of infatuation’ (Taylor,

p. 49). Rather than offering certainties, Villon prefers ‘to hold

the contradictions in suspension’ (Taylor, p. 50). It is easy to

understand how the construction of such a ‘restless, protean self’

Stevenson6.indb 85 23/10/2009 19:25


as Taylor describes (p. 57), one who is drawn to the playful and

ironic, would appeal to Stevenson, who is attracted to this man

of mysteries, with his multiple names and identities, uncertain

history, and unfathomable – sometimes seemingly contradictory

– motives.9

n

In his tantalizingly brief discussion of Die Leiden des jungen

Werthers in the essay on ‘Books Which have Influenced Me’,10

Stevenson responds to George Henry Lewes’ The Life and Works

of Goethe.11 Werther is, of course, the story of a sensitive young

man who meets and falls passionately in love with a young

woman, Lotte, who is already betrothed to another young man,

Albert, whom she marries in the course of the novel. Werther’s

despair at his hopeless situation intensifies, until he eventually

kills himself with one of Albert’s pistols.

Stevenson, like Lewes and many others before and since,

regards Werther as a roman à clef. A study of critical responses

to Werther by Bruce Duncan, to choose a recent example, devotes

an entire chapter to tracing the antecedents of Goethe’s novel

to real events connected with Goethe’s life.12 As Duncan notes,

‘everyone knew that Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem’s shock and suicide

in 1772 was the model for Werther’s death’, and many knew from

the time of Werther’s publication in 1774 that Goethe’s acquaint-

ances, Charlotte Buff and Johann Georg Christian Kestner, were

the models for Lotte and Albert in the novel (p. 107). Duncan

observes that even many modern critics who remain sceptical

about a biographical approach to the book admit some ‘notion of

Goethe’s and Werther’s overlapping identities’ and suggest ‘that

the author wrote himself out of the very malaise that claimed his

hero’, basing these inferences partly on Goethe’s 1813 account in

Dichtung und Wahrheit of how he suffered from suicidal think-

ing at the time he began Werther (Duncan, pp. 113 and 114).

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87Hirsch

The connection between Goethe’s biography and Werther was

also stressed by Lewes, writing 150 years before Duncan. Quoting

extensively from Kestner’s complaints that in his novel Goethe

had altered many of the facts of the relationship he and his wife

had with Goethe (I, pp. 237-38), Lewes argued that Werther is ‘a

book composed out of a double history, the history of its author’s

experience, and the history of one of his friends’, the suicide Karl

Wilhelm Jerusalem (I, p. 217). The point Stevenson in his essay

draws from Lewes is that ‘in that crowning offense of Werther’,

Goethe treated the real-life originals for Lotte and Albert shab-

bily; Goethe ‘seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking

open the doors of private life and wantonly wounding friends’

(Works IV, p. 472). In a more positive vein, however, Stevenson

praises Goethe for ‘his fine devotion to his art’ and ‘his honest and

serviceable friendship for Schiller’ (p. 473). Stevenson concludes

that, in the case of Lewes’s study of Goethe, ‘biography, usually

so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the

work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue

of man’s nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit

and persevere in the same character’ (p. 473).

Stevenson himself does not classify persons into rigid, narrow,

poorly descriptive categories that ignore or exclude data. He can

recognise and acknowledge contradictory data and arrive at a

nuanced evaluation, one that would place the person or thing

being evaluated on a continuum anchored at opposing ends by

positive and negative poles. Nor in his own reaction to personal

disappointments does he fall into the dichotomizing thought

patterns that nurture feelings of hopelessness and a sense of

one’s inability to shape outcomes, patterns which underlie and

feed suicidal thinking and behaviour. Biographical information

and passages from Stevenson’s letters expand and clarify the sig-

nificance of his brief discussion of Goethe and Werther in ‘Books

Which Have Influenced Me’.

Following the trail blazed by both Werther and his creator,

Stevenson6.indb 87 23/10/2009 19:25


Goethe, Stevenson in 1873 had met and fallen hopelessly in

love with a married woman. In fact, Frances Sitwell was doubly

proscribed for Stevenson. First, she was married to the Reverend

Albert Hunt Sitwell – though the marriage had been founder-

ing for some time and Mrs. Sitwell had, according to the editors

of Stevenson’s Letters,13 by then decided to leave her husband,

which she did in 1874. Second, Mrs. Sitwell already had a long-

standing friendship with Sidney Colvin – dating from ‘some time

in the late 1860s’, according to the editors of Stevenson’s Letters

(I, p. 45), and Colvin was soon to become an important sponsor

of Stevenson’s literary career. Colvin and Mrs. Sitwell eventually

married in 1903.

Despite these complications, Frances Sitwell became

Stevenson’s chief correspondent and confidante in the letters

written in the fall of 1873 and winter of 1874. His letters to her,

which are all that survive of their correspondence (hers were

destroyed), are alternately playful, rapturous, and anguished.

He addresses her as ‘my dear’ and ‘my darling’, and uses vari-

ous pet names – Claire, Madonna, and Consuelo (which means

consolation and is borrowed from George Sand). He reports that

he is despondent and wretched when her letters do not come as

expected (Letters I, p. 335). He sprinkles his letters with German

quotations from Heine as well as Goethe, compares himself

explicitly to Werther and Goethe, and connects Mrs. Sitwell with

Werther’s beloved Lotte, as in this remarkable passage:

These good booksellers of mine have at last got me a

Werther without illustrations. I want you to like Charlotte

[i.e. Lotte]; she is, in some ways, not unlike one you know

[presumably, Mrs. Sitwell herself]. Werther himself has

every feebleness and vice that could tend to make his

suicide a most virtuous and commendable action; and

yet I like Werther too – I don’t know why except that he

has written the most delightful letters in the world. Note,

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89Hirsch

by the way, the passage under the date June 21st not far

from the beginning; it finds a voice for a great deal of

dumb, uneasy, pleasurable longing that we have all had,

times without number. [The passage in Werther describes

yearning for an unattainable happiness.] I looked that up

the other day for ‘Roads’, so I know the reference; but you

will find it [the book] a garden of flowers from beginning

to end. All through the passion keeps steadily rising,

from the thunderstorm at the country-house – there was

thunder in that story too – up to the last wild delirious

interview; either Lotte was no good at all, or else Werther

should have remained alive after that; either he knew his

woman too well, or else he was precipitate. But an idiot

like that is hopeless; and yet, he wasn’t an idiot – I make

reparation, and will offer eighteen pounds of best wax

at his tomb. Poor devil, he was only the weakest14 – or,

at least, a very weak-strong man. (Letters I, p. 293; the

bracketed comments are my additions)

The passage conveys Stevenson’s identification of himself and

Mrs. Sitwell with Werther and Lotte, and the very complicated,

jocular assessments he offers of the literary characters (perhaps

Lotte is an ideal figure, or perhaps ‘no good at all’; perhaps

Werther is a feeble, hopeless idiot, or perhaps he is a mixture

of strengths and weaknesses, remarkable for his passion and

longing; but in any case he is – like Stevenson himself, one is

tempted to interject in the midst of Stevenson’s letter to Mrs.

Sitwell – such a wonderful letter-writer!). In his next letter to

Frances Sitwell, Stevenson pre-emptively hopes that ‘you will

not misunderstand this letter and think I am Werthering all over

the place’ (I, p. 296). A few days later Stevenson laments how

chill and dreary Edinburgh is, waxes nostalgic about Cockfield,

the place he first met Mrs. Sitwell, and boasts a bit by seeming

to allude to their own potential for scandal: ‘And to look back

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out of all this on Cockfield! If I were as unscrupulous as Goethe,

I believe I could write a book about some events in my life that

would rather tickle the long ears’ (I, p. 302). Stevenson certainly

seems to feel unhappy and even at times desperate in these let-

ters, sensing that things are not going to break in his favour. The

ironic tone is complex, but the playfulness and gentle mockery

seem telling. He can recognise his own passion, parallel to

Werther’s, and at the same time cast aspersions on the excesses

of the romantic Werther. Stevenson’s disinclination for dichoto-

mous thought, his ability to distance and meta-cognate about his

thinking and feeling, serve him well. Already at a relatively young

age, he has the resources he will require for coping with a difficult

and challenging life.

If one brings together, then, Stevenson’s essayistic treatment

of Goethe and his private correspondence with Mrs. Sitwell, con-

necting the literary essay with his personal history, Stevenson’s

attitude toward Werther and Lewes’s reading of that novel

becomes especially interesting: Stevenson is able to put himself

in the place of the literary characters (and their author), is able to

grasp the similarities between their situations and his own, and

comes up with an attempt at some sort of complex assessment

which involves both identification and a certain ironic, critical

detachment.15

n

In nearly all of his literary essays, not just those dealing with a

continental European author, Stevenson strives for a balanced

and judicious assessment. In his essay on ‘Samuel Pepys’, he

notes that Pepys represents himself as the ‘adored protagonist’

of his diary – ‘adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and

enduring human toleration’ (Works IV, p. 305). Stevenson prais-

es Pepys’s reluctance to understate his own faults and meanness:

‘the bald truth about himself, what we are all too timid to admit

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when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw clearly

and set down unsparingly’ (p. 305). Pepys communicates not

only ‘the greatness of his life’, but its smallness as well, convey-

ing ‘the news that his periwig was once alive with nits’ (p. 307).

Pepys would buy ‘an idle, roguish French book’, burn it to avoid

disgrace, but then record both the purchase and destruction in

his diary, revealing all to his readers (p. 299). Stevenson clearly

admires an openness to embrace contradiction in his subjects

similar to that which he finds in himself. Another example is

Walt Whitman: he praises Whitman precisely because ‘the world

as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and

historical, with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsisten-

cies, is what he wishes to set forth’ in his poetry (Works IV, p.

125). Whitman is in the end cheerful, rejecting the European

literature of woe; he wishes, rather, to ‘testify to the livableness

of life’ (pp. 120 and 121); ‘his is a morality without a prohibition;

his policy is one of encouragement all round’ (p. 130).

Stevenson finds Robert Burns a person with a head of gold

but feet of clay (Works IV, pp. 63-64). He describes Burns as

always immersed in love affairs – indeed sinking ‘more and more

toward the professional Don Juan’ (p. 70). Burns again illus-

trates the potential disjunction between the life of an author and

the writing he produces. Stevenson admires Burns’s colloquial,

intense use of the Scottish language, his ‘frank, direct, and mas-

terly utterance’ and the way homely subjects ‘have been passed

through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man’ (p. 107). But

he is troubled by Burns’s wenching, his peasant tastes, and his

‘downward course’ in later years, ‘whether as a man, a husband,

or a poet’ (p. 99). Burns is ‘a man, alas! who is equally at the

call of his worse and better instincts’ (p. 92). We who attempt

to ‘read’ his character must ‘be gentle in our thoughts’ (p. 109).

When Stevenson writes about fictional characters, the things

he notices are also characteristically mixed, composite. In his

essay on ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, he takes up what is surely

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as strange a set of ‘gentlemen-heroes’ in Dickens as one might

find: ‘the sottish [Sydney] Carton, the effete Twemlow, [and] the

insolent [Eugene] Wrayburn’ (Works XII, p. 320). Wrayburn

particularly interests Stevenson, because Dickens has made

him ‘insolent to the verge, and sometimes beyond the verge, of

what is pardonable’ (p. 322), especially when Wrayburn abuses

and attempts to manipulate the Jew Riah at the end of Book 2,

Chapter 15 of Our Mutual Friend: ‘Dickens, in an hour of irritated

nerves, and under pressure of [completing] the monthly number,

defaced his Wrayburn. Observe what he sacrifices. The ruling

passion [presumably Wrayburn’s desire for Lizzie Hexam] strong

in his hour of weakness, he [Dickens] sacrifices dignity, decency,

the essential human beauties of his hero; he still preserves the

dialect, the shrill note of personality, the mark of identification’

(p. 323).16 In other words, although Wrayburn stoops lower here

than ever before, the reader can recognise the essential hero even

in the base scoundrel. What draws Stevenson’s attention is pre-

cisely the way in which the ideal falters and ‘the gentleman is not

genteel’ (p. 323), the moment when Eugene Wrayburn attracts

and repels at once.

n

The preface Stevenson wrote for the several earlier essays he col-

lected for the 1882 volume Familiar Studies of Men and Books

reveals much about Stevenson’s attitudes toward his subjects.

The preface steps back a bit from the arguments of the individual

essays, most of which had initially been published some years

earlier, and it offers the plea that the ‘short study’, as Stevenson

calls the genre in which he had worked, is necessarily selective

and essentially presents one ‘point of view’ (Works IV, pp. 9

and 10). Given that fact, such a short study may not be entirely

accurate or, at any rate, comprehensive and complete. There is

in the genre, then, an inherent risk of simplification, ‘caricature’,

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and even ‘calumny’ (p. 10). Stevenson notes that ‘the moral bias’

of Thomas Carlyle, whom Stevenson sees as his predecessor in

the short study, did indeed lead Carlyle to be too judgmental

toward his subjects: ‘The “point of view” was imposed by Carlyle

on the men he judged of in his writings, with an austerity not only

cruel but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on

the Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured’ (p. 11).

Clearly, in preparing his preface Stevenson wondered whether

he had also occasionally been too frank and had erred on the side

of severity in some of his original periodical essays – those on

Burns, Villon, and Whitman, in particular. Stevenson’s prefatory

remark is probably intended both to ward off any anticipated

criticism and to indicate that individuals cannot properly be

judged in dichotomous terms.

If anything, then, the preface underlines the fact that in his

literary essays Stevenson is remarkable for his efforts to be even-

handed, for the complexity and balance of his judgments, and

for seeing his subjects as mixtures of virtues and shortcomings.

That seems to have been his fundamental cast of mind, and

certainly a twenty-first century reader would be unlikely to fault

him for partiality or excessive criticism in spite of the anxiety

on that score he expresses in the preface to Familiar Studies.

As Stevenson sympathetically and shrewdly observes there, ‘all

have some fault’, and all of us are likely to persevere in it (pp.

13-14). The real problem arises when one calls someone else ‘bad,

with a self-righteous chuckle’ (p. 14). Of the subjects of these

‘familiar studies’, however, Stevenson contends ‘these were all

men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not

love the men, my love was the greater to their books’ (pp. 24-25).

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Notes

1 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, ‘Negotiating Middlemarch,’ in ‘Middlemarch’ in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Karen Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107-31 (p. 117).

2 Aaron T. Beck, Arthur Freeman & Associates, Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders (New York: Guilford, 1990), p. 187. See also Judith S. Beck, Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond (New York: Guilford, 1995), pp. 118-19.

3 How and why Stevenson achieved this complexity of thought is an interesting question, though a difficult one to answer with certainty. Perhaps this cast of mind was largely a function of his innate temperament or his intelligence. It might also have developed as he matured and came to challenge the ‘black-or-white’ thinking of his sternly Calvinist father and his fiercely religious childhood nurse, Alison Cunningham. All of Stevenson’s biographers discuss the impact of this exposure to Scottish Calvinism on his thinking. Glenda Norquay’s recent study of Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) takes an especially thoughtful approach to this Calvinist background, showing how it led Stevenson to consider not only evil and sin but also, partly in the way of a response, the pleasures of reading, as expressed by his attraction to the aesthetic and to romance forms (as opposed to realism).

4 In the October 1877 issue of Temple Bar, Stevenson also published a story about Francis Villon under the title ‘A Lodging for the Night’, which became one of the first of his stories to appear in print. Stevenson was obviously greatly attracted to this scandalous medieval poet.

5 Auguste Longnon, Étude biographique sur François Villon (Paris: Menu, 1877).

6 Stevenson’s essay on Villon was first collected in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1882), along with eight other essays that originally appeared in periodicals, primarily Cornhill Magazine, between 1874 and 1881. I take the word ‘familiar’ in the volume’s title to mean something like everyday, plain, informal. A preface, which is discussed later in this paper, was added for the collection. All quotations in this paper from Stevenson’s literary essays are taken from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Vailima

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Edition, 26 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), and page citations are included parenthetically in the text.

7 In the later ‘preface’ to Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Stevenson more specifically identifies Zola, the Goncourts, and ‘the infinitely greater Flaubert’ as those contemporary French writers in whom ‘the spirit of Villon is still living’. Stevenson also insists that Villon, ‘while similar [to these writers] in ugliness [i.e. brutal realism], still surpasses them in native power’ (p. 21).

8 Jane H. M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 47.

9 For Stevenson’s own playful style, see Matthew Kaiser ‘Mapping Stevenson’s Rhetorics of Play’ in this issue.

10 ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ was first published in The British Weekly, 13 May 1887, pp. 17-19.

11 George Henry Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe: With Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries, from Published and Unpublished Sources, 2 vols (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856).

12 Bruce Duncan, Goethe’s ‘Werther’ and the Critics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005).

13 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95), vol I, p. 46.

14 In Goethe’s novel, Albert and Werther debate whether an act of suicide should be deemed an expression of strength or of weakness, ‘eine Schwäche’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, ed. E. L. Stahl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 52.

15 Cf. Stevenson’s essay on ‘Some Aspects of Robert Burns’, where he notes: ‘to write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with our subject’ (Works IV, p. 61). In the essay on Burns, in fact, Stevenson devotes considerable attention to Mrs. Agnes M’Lehose, a married woman who had been deserted by her husband and with whom Burns carried on a flirtatious correspondence, as between Clarinda and Sylvander (pp. 86-87). Stevenson notes Clarinda’s familiarity with Werther (87), and in writing of Burns and Mrs. M’Lehose betrays his personal knowledge of the risks of such a correspondence: ‘It is hardly safe for a man and woman in the flush of their years to write almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes

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too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance’ (p. 87). Stevenson also seems to have harboured the idea of turning his own correspondence with Mrs. Sitwell into an epistolary novel, requesting that copies of his letters be returned for this purpose. See Claire Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 91 and 167.

16 Stevenson is self-consciously vague in discussing the example he has chosen – ‘in this scene, and in one other (if I remember aright) where it is echoed’, he writes (p. 320) – and it is possible that he has conflated Riah’s scene with another a few chapters later (Book 3, Chapter 10) in which Eugene despicably plies Jenny Wren’s father with rum and money in order to discover the location of Lizzie Hexam’s country hideaway. Like Riah, Jenny Wren’s father is another elderly man, nicknamed ‘Mr. Dolls’ by Eugene, just as Eugene slightingly re-names Riah ‘Mr. Aaron’. Eugene’s friend, Mortimer Lightwood, who is present at the interview with Jenny Wren’s father, protests and underlines Eugene’s degradation at this moment: ‘Eugene, Eugene, [. . .] can you stoop to the use of such an instrument as this?’ – Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 539.

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Stevenson and Conrad: colonial imagination and photography

Rosella Mallardi

The present contribution investigates the contact zone with the

Other in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1891) and Heart of Darkness

(1899), highlighting the associated narrative strategies that

inform this reorientation, specifically the visual modalities

and, in particular, those inspired by photographic, and proto-

cinematographic representation.

Both texts adopt the vision of a first-person narrator recount-

ing his own experiences, and present a sophisticated use of

perspective, varied perspective and the control of distance, in the

representation of the self in confrontation with the other. More

importantly, both texts focus on those moments in which the

direct perception of what surrounds the I/eye stirs unexpected,

surprising and disturbing responses, glimpses of the ‘latency’ of

the self. The discourse of the ‘I’ fits ‘these changing lights’, giving

voice to the emotional response of the viewer, to interior durée,

and to the multiple dimensions of consciousness. It is a modern,

fluid, polyphonic, and suggestive vision often accompanied by

either an immediate, or, more interestingly, a delayed awareness

of the fallacy of subjective judgement and prejudice, and, in any

case, of the limits of natural vision. This limitation demands a

redefinition of the relation between visible and invisible, sub-

stance and appearance, social mask and hidden inclinations and

desires. Ultimately, it is an approach that breaks definitively with

the Victorian epistemic system founded on objective vision, and

with a realism based on the Narrator’s reliability and authority.

In the elaboration of this world-view, photographs, daguerreo-

types and the magic lantern play a primary role. Both authors

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make frequent implicit and explicit reference to these visual

media and to their specific terms, forms and procedures, using

key words and phrases such as ‘pose’, ‘manipulation of light and

pose’, ‘moonshine spectrality’, ‘phantom show’, ‘apparitions’,

‘particularised impressions’, ‘latency’, ‘the mirror with memory’.

In addition, they adopt techniques of narration that can be seen

as equivalent to framing, to moving or rolling panoramas, zoom

shots, dissolves, superimposition, and phantasmagorical and

spiritualistic photographic effects.

Photography, the new art of the century, from its birth, and

up to the nineties, charmed literature not only for its realism

but particularly on account of the peculiarly spectral-spiritistic-

spiritualist quality of its images.1 The unprecedented way of

looking at reality that resulted, played its part in the formation of

Stevenson and Conrad’s colonial imagination. By interposing a

mechanical diaphragm between the eye and reality, photography

discovers an unpredictable and incoercible temporality, which

inevitably outdoes or betrays the photographer’s intention. In

addition to this, it creates a magical effect of time spatialisation,

in that the photographic image, while evoking in the observer

a past moment inexorably lost, is at the same time capable of

creating the illusion of restoring that past to the present, of

‘resuscitating’ the dead, or even of including future projections.

Precisely because photography is capable of assigning to the sub-

ject the illusion of a condition of reality and truth, its utilization

in a magic lantern performance adds a novel fascination to the

spectacle of shadows and demons – to us proto-cinematographic

– to the extent of encouraging the perception of that phantasma-

goria as reality itself, blurring the boundary between fiction and

truthfulness. It is also clear that the new visual art, while neces-

sarily linked to reality, confers on the image an unprecedented

autonomy and power: since the photograph is separated from

the referent, decontextualised from present, past and future,

it stirs the mental and emotional responses of the individual

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observer, and assimilates the projection of his/her ideologies and

imagination.

Stevenson’s Polynesian works, from the historical chronicles,

to the travelogues and tales, all display a marked scopic struc-

ture: Stevenson, while still only superficially acquainted with

Polynesian history, beliefs and languages, explores the signifi-

cance of the signs of the Other, relying partly on local mediators

and interpreters, but above all on his own careful observation

of the relational dynamics with the Other. In In the South Seas,

Stevenson reads between the lines with his natural eye, studies

the gestures, facial and body language, notates tones, pauses and

silences, and, more often than not, utilises optical instruments,

like the spy-glass, after which he had named the famous tavern

in Treasure Island, as well as the camera and the magic lantern.

They are all tools that are perfectly adapted to his need for a new

positioning of the observer in the face of reality, all useful for

demonstrating the limits of natural vision and for shifting atten-

tion to the invisible, towards those latent inclinations, emotions,

dynamics, which nonetheless control our perception of things.2

This physical proximity which is often accompanied by the

irresistible seduction of the places, the fantastic dresses and the

tattooed bodies, by the dance and song of the natives, sometimes

seizes him with disturbing sensations, especially when he real-

ises that he himself is the object of the more-or-less hidden gaze

of the natives, and even of their ‘supervision’. Often, the uneasi-

ness of being stared at by the Other turns into sudden fear when

he sees himself as the possible victim of, or prey to the ‘latent’,

incontrollable cannibal instincts of the natives. He also adds that

only his later acquisition of those culture-specific phenomena

showed him the groundlessness of his fears:

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with

Mrs. Stevenson and the ship’s cook. Except for the Casco

lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind

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and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric empti-

ness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense of

isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the

trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and

scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold!

In two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol

and watching us, you would have said, without a wink.

The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was

gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead

in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the

immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that per-

haps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us

with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook

(whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set

foot on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be

driving on the rocks, it was amusing to observe that man’s

alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting him upon the

beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that

the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were

drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and

when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were

doubtless more troubled than ourselves.3 (My italics.)

In In the South Seas, the contrast between visible and invis-

ible, light and shadow, tangible manifestation and disturbing

latency, becomes more significant when Stevenson recounts the

use of a camera or the mounting of a magic lantern performance.

The camera usually takes in the landscape, the gatherings, the

representative events and people of the Polynesian community,

even magical practices and the local ‘devil work’, but Stevenson

is particularly keen to report and comment on those moments

that go beyond the ordinary expectations of the traveller-photog-

rapher. During a photographic reportage in the Marquesas, he

records an amusing and intriguing situation when the centre of

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the photograph was being contended by the former and the cur-

rent chief of the village, an unexpected spectacle for both whites

and natives. The result was, to the photographer, a particularly

suggestive portrait, in that the rival in his ‘ill-omened array’ and

the new chief ‘in his careful European dress’, captured side by

side in the limited space of the photograph, seemed to resuscitate

the far and near past of the island. An image that, according to

Stevenson, might have been more complete if the backdrop had

portrayed a graveyard with its crosses, ‘the aptest symbol of the

future’ (South Seas, pp. 136-37).

Another unforgettable moment occurs in the Gilbert Islands

when Stevenson, inside the church taking photographs, is star-

tled by a piercing cry coming from the road, goes to the main

entrance and from that perspective stares at two women who

are savagely fighting, the first locks her teeth in the adversary’s

face, shaking her like a dog, while the other counterattacks and

scratches:

In the church, where we had wandered photographing,

we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry. The scene,

looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow,

was unforgettable. The palms, the quaint and scattered

houses, the flag of the island streaming from its tall

staff, glowed with intolerable sunshine. In the midst two

women rolled fighting on the grass. The combatants were

the more easy to be distinguished, because the one was

stripped to the ridi and the other wore a holoku (sacque)

of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth

locked in her adversary’s face, shaking her like a dog; the

other impotently fought and scratched. So for a moment

we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then

the mob closed and shut them in. (South Seas, p. 238.)

It is too sudden a scene for the camera to take, but the image

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is indelibly imprinted in his mind, in fact he visualises it later

as a ‘photograph’ and interprets it as a manifestation of ‘beastly

latency’. That image is a deep shock, a sort of evolutionary

chemical developer, which reminds him of similar forgotten

scenes and sensations, experienced in a more familiar context, in

highly civilised London, and which he will never forget:

The night was exquisite, the silence enchanting; yet as I

lay in my hammock looking on the strong moonshine and

the quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted me of the

two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile

embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I

could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt.

The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man’s

beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense

than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are

elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to

forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell

on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day’s work; the

imagination readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects,

on the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our

race upon its lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly

itself, dwelling pell-mell and hugger-mugger, hairy man

with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet to be just

to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and

dens of our cities; I must not forget that I have passed din-

nerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me of

my dinner. (South Seas, p. 239.)

The use of the magic lantern is especially interesting when it

gathers Stevenson’s group and the natives in front of a proto-

cinematographic performance as in the Gilbert Islands. He accu-

rately records a performance in a church at night, during which

the natives are charmed and seduced by the play of biblical and

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entertainment pictures projected onto the wall:

While the magic lantern was showing, I skulked without in

the dark. [. . .] Presently a distant sound of singing arose

and approached; and a procession drew near along the road

[. . .] the little band of the heathen paused irresolute at the

corner, and melted before the attractions of a magic lantern,

like a glacier in spring. The more staunch vainly taunted

the deserters; three fled in a guilty silence, but still fled; and

when at length the leader found the wit or the authority to

get his troop in motion and revive the singing, it was with

much diminished forces that they passed musically on up

the dark road.

Meanwhile inside the luminous pictures brightened and

faded. I stood for some while unobserved in the rear of the

spectators, when I could hear just in front of me a pair of

lovers following the show with interest, the male playing the

part of interpreter and (like Adam) mingling caresses with

his lecture. The wild animals [. . .] were hailed with joy; but

the chief marvel and delight was in the gospel series. [. . .]

[T]he exposure of these pious ‘phantoms’ did as a matter

of fact silence in all that part of the island the voice of the

scoffer.

‘Why then,’ the word went round, ‘why then, the Bible is

true!’ And on our return afterwards we were told the impres-

sion was yet lively, and those who had seen might be heard

telling those who had not, ‘O yes, it is all true; these things

all happened, we have seen the pictures.’ The argument is

not so childish as it seems; for I doubt if these islanders are

acquainted with any other mode of representation but pho-

tography; so that the picture of an event [. . .] would appear

strong proof of its occurrence. (South Seas, pp. 258-60.)

The natives appropriate the western culture-specific products

and interpret them according to their individual sensibility, a

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source of singularly surprising aesthetic pleasure and/or docu-

ments of Biblical truth. On his part, Stevenson is delighted to

view the irresistible magical power of photography to fabricate

reality itself. But even more intriguing is the varied perspective

adopted by Stevenson during the performance, in fact, while

directing the magic lantern performance itself, he also observes,

compares and enjoys the phantasmagorical play of the individual

responses of the occasional viewers standing outside and of the

people inside the church, actually another visual and aural spec-

tacle within the spectacle.

‘The Beach of Falesá’ foregrounds this empowered vision, and

though there is no direct reference to photography and the magic

lantern, the visual strategies in the story recall these two popular

arts. This Polynesian tale provides a new stage to explore the

complex interaction between shadows of the whites and of the

natives, it gives voice to Stevenson’s awareness of the complex

dynamics that regulate understanding and knowledge, as subtly

manipulated by cultural, racial prejudices, or overpowered by

the emergence of ‘latent’ pulsions.

The opening image focuses on the far distance of Wiltshire from

Falesá at dawn and under the moonshine: he explores the horizon

with his glass, finally identifying his station and the natives’ small

houses hidden under the tangle of the woods. Retrospectively,

that image supporting the westerner’s scopic power also encap-

sulates an effect of dramatic irony, since Wiltshire himself is to

become the object of the controlling gaze of others.

The exercise of power through the eye and language, which the

initial image thematises, is temporarily suspended at the land-

ing, since Wiltshire chooses Case as mediator, a cunning inter-

preter who manipulates natives and gets Wiltshire ghettoised. It

is now Wiltshire’s turn to become the object of the scopic power

of the natives. To get rid of the insolent supervision of those eyes,

whose fascination, he will later find out, is based on the fact that

he has married Uma, the native woman tabooed because she has

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105Mallardi

the ‘evil eye’, Wiltshire must break Case’s magic spell on the com-

munity. He has to explore the most obscure and deserted area

of the island, by the natives significantly named ‘eye’, home to

local demons and the dead, a place from which his white enemy,

through magic and sorcery, draws his power. As he penetrates

the forest, he realises that it closes in behind him, he feels sur-

rounded by weird and menacing sounds, until he perceives it

as a living body, with a soul and a piercing eye, as if the Other,

and his/her beliefs and more or less horrid ‘superstitions’ were

inextricably and absolutely tied to the place:

We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see

how many traders take them up, splendidly educated

young men, that have been bookkeepers (some of them)

and clerks in the old country! It’s my belief that a supersti-

tion grows up in a place like the different kinds of weeds;

and as I stood there, and listened to that wailing, I twit-

tered in my shoes.4

This first ‘voyage of discovery’ leads him to a sort of temple

where some repugnant idols and masks are on show, but the

high point of Case’s witchcraft is the theatrical shrine around a

‘shining face’, glowing with ‘luminous paint’. This trick, which in

the dim light ‘dwindles and waxes and at times smokes’, reminds

him, and us, of the magic lantern performances of demons and

shadows, in fact he haughtily calls these tricks ‘bogies [. . .] as

fresh as toys out of a shop’:

I went in as far as the bend, and looking round the corner,

saw a shining face. It was big and ugly like a pantomime

mask, and the brightness of it waxed and dwindled, and at

times it smoked.

‘Oho,’ says I, ‘luminous paint!’ (‘Falesá’, p. 356.)

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During his second journey into the wilderness, this time at

night, it is the light of his own lantern that makes ‘the whole

place, or all could be seen of it’, ‘a kind of a puzzle of turning

shadows’, a frightening phantasmagoria haunted by the hidden

presence of the ‘devil-women’ of the local stories told by his wife,

and the ‘man-pigs’ of cannibal tales, to such an extent that he

mistakes his wife Uma for a demon, the real personification of

the woman with the evil eye. Another perspectival shift informs

us that Uma, for love’s sake, has been able to overcome her

‘superstitious’ ancestral fears of the demons’ ‘eye’, in order to tell

her husband that Case is on his track. The lens is now directed

at the forest, which soon shakes with Wiltshire’s explosion of the

shrine, pieces of wood fall down onto the earth to illumine this

ominous phantasmagoria: the two rivals fight with a ruthless

violence, recalling that of the two women of the Gilbert Islands.

When Wiltshire wakes up, all wet with his enemy’s blood, he

repeatedly hits Case’s dead body, assuaging, through sight, a

cannibalistic thirst for blood and hunger for meat:

and every time I looked over to Case I could have

sung and whistled. Talk about meat and drink! To see

that man lying there dead as a herring filled me full.

(‘Falesá’, p. 369.)

The powerful ‘eye’ of Falesá, like the spy-glass of the opening

scene, highlights the dark side, ‘develops’ the latent dimensions

of the white hero: his ‘voyage of discovery’ plunges the reader

into Wiltshire’s self, capturing his bestial instinct to exterminate

or cannibalise the enemy, white but still Other. In this limited

space, both literal and symbolic, Stevenson has rehearsed his

hero’s visible and invisible self: his present condition as a

civilised British citizen and his original brutal past, his obstinate

repugnance for and discrimination against local superstitions

and rites while at the same time being possessed by them, his

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107Mallardi

superior distance from cannibalism while satisfying his thirst for

blood and vengeance.

When at dawn light awakens him, Wiltshire looks for Uma and

finds her shocked and weeping silently, not far from him, hav-

ing possibly witnessed everything. ‘It appears she was afraid to

cry out loud, because of the aitus’, briefly comments Wiltshire.

Here Stevenson adopts dramatic irony to underline the hero’s

hypocritical reaction: Wiltshire haughtily stigmatises his wife’s

superstition, shifting the reader’s attention from the fear, evil and

terror caused by himself and Case to those raised by the ‘demons’

living in the area, forgetting that Uma had overcome her fears

to come to his aid. He might even believe that the forces of evil

have returned to the ‘eye’, but to the critical reader-spectator of

all that horror, the story has clearly revealed that the ‘Double’ is

only removed into the hero’s subconscious.

The epilogue underlines Wiltshire’s sense of racial superiority:

only after hearing the news about Black Jack’s horrible death, the

last survivor of Case’s gang, can he finally feel himself ‘left alone

in [his] glory’:

the nigger was turned out of the island for stealing from

white men, and went off to the west, where he found men

of his own colour, in case he liked that, and the men of his

own colour took and ate him at some kind of corroborree

and I’m sure I hope he was to their fancy! (‘Falesá’, p. 370.)

Despite his prejudices against the natives, he will remain in

the South Seas, devoted to his excellent Uma, and only worried

about the difficulty of finding white husbands for his half-caste

daughters.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also structured around discourse,

varied perspective and the control of distance. Conrad performs

two acts of enunciation, in that Marlow’s discourse is framed in

the first narrator’s diegetic level. Marlow’s discourse as Narrator,

Stevenson6.indb 107 23/10/2009 19:25


doubles into Marlow’s perceptions as protagonist, in that

the story, from Brussels on, is centred on the most significant

moment-fragments of that experience. This perception is based

on single visual and aural impressions that seem to emanate from

bodies and places,5 and which maintain their vividness thanks to

dialogues and to free direct and indirect discourse:

From behind that structure came out an impression of

pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man himself.

He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on

the handle-end of ever so millions. He shook hands, I

fancy, was satisfied with my French. Bon voyage. (Heart

of Darkness, p. 14.)

Marlow collocates the Africans at a remote temporal distance,

setting their consciousness at the dawn of history, but the spatial,

spectacular, dramatic structure of the narrative, which displays

his direct contact with the natives, reveals unexpected, surpris-

ing and destabilizing feelings and thoughts. The journey unfolds

as a sequence of pictures: particularly impressive is the ‘picture’

of the natives in the ‘outer station’. Taking shelter in a grove

and almost deafened by the uninterrupted, rushing noise of the

rapids, he suddenly realises that the soil is scattered with black

shapes. They are the natives dying slowly. A mine goes off – a

clear sign of the whites’ presence and of their determination –

the earth trembles, and he is now fully aware that these Africans

are victims of the conditions imposed by progress coming from

the sea: these phantoms have been deprived of their land and

freedom and are consumed by disease and starvation, they are

‘bundles of acute angles, [. . .] in every pose of contorted col-

lapse. As in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence’ (Heart of

Darkness, pp. 20-21). His understanding can only rely on essen-

tial gestures, details, traces, he stares at one of them, their eyes

meet, he offers him a biscuit, the black fingers close slowly on it;

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109Mallardi

but a small detail, a bit of white worsted round that African neck,

so incongruous in that context, suddenly reverses his perspec-

tive: Marlow feels puzzled because it is now he that is ‘alienated’

from the meaning that familiar sign has acquired on the body of

the other.

As he sails up-river, in the deep silence of the still image of that

unfathomable nature, the disappearance of any familiar signs to

which he could anchor his identity, might perhaps hollow out

Marlow and all the other whites on board into phantoms, but,

then, the sudden glimpse of a scene animated by natives, with

their gestures, acts, expressions, and human tones, discloses

another unthought-of perspective. Though Marlow is prone to

interposing an unbridgeable distance between civilised and

primitive man, the immediate contact brings to light a common

hidden reality. Though the natives’ sighs, laments, invocations,

passionate gestures cannot be verbally decoded, they yet speak a

universal language. Marlow is aware of an original, ‘latent feeling

of fellowship’6 that suddenly revives, contrasting with the futility

of ‘principles’, or, perhaps, in this case it might be more correct to

call these principles superstructural ‘rags’, ‘acquisitions, clothes,

pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake’ (p.

38). Of that truth ‘stripped of its cloak of time’, the reader too

gets a faint trace, a luminous, evanescent glimpse. It is with this

truth that he has to reckon, but this makes him uneasy and a

pause is needed. It is now the turn of the first narrator to intro-

duce a new perspective: in the darkness now enveloping the ship,

he portrays Marlow like a daguerreotype spectre that appears

and disappears in the dim light of a match, an effect that likens

Marlow to the other phantoms in the story, but, at the same time,

this first narrator, from the reader’s point of view, is just a voice.

The story is shaped like an optical illusion regulated on distance

and on varied perspective, fitting infinitely different discourses,

reflecting an echo of discourses, verbal traces, the words/simu-

lacra of a lost Referent.

Stevenson6.indb 109 23/10/2009 19:25


But the invisible hides, for Marlow, an even more disruptive

force: to the false and rotting spectre of the white ‘slaves’, wor-

shippers of the god ivory, Marlow opposes the secret and silent

‘intention’ of the African wilderness. Africa is portrayed like a

surface impression that refers back to an invisible reality, like the

staring eye of an inscrutable entity patiently waiting for the pass-

ing of the pilgrims’ ‘fantastic invasion’ (p. 26), fantastic because

unreal, and charged with false ideologies. Perhaps, Kurtz, who is

at the culminating point of his journey, has the key to that great

enigma. It is remarkable that, when he has to represent the allu-

siveness and stillness of that impression, Conrad uses ‘spectral’

images, bathed in the ‘silvery moonshine’:

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the

moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint

sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the

land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its

greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life. [. . .]

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver

[. . .]. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man

jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness

on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant

as an appeal or as a menace. [. . .] Yet somehow it didn’t

bring any image with it – no more than if I had been told

an angel or a fiend was in there. (Heart of Darkness, p.

28.)

These images recall another at the beginning of the novella,

used by the first narrator when describing the missing centre

or the unstable referent in Marlow’s speech ‘in the likeness of

one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the

spectral illumination of moonshine’ (p. 9). This missing centre

is now Africa’s heart, and its invisible heart is latency itself,

the imponderable enigma of life, an epistemic and linguistic

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111Mallardi

enigma, in that the core of its intention cannot be grasped. They

are images that recall the photographic forms of representation

and, more specifically, the silver plate of the daguerreotype.

The daguerreotype, like the photograph, is a mirror requiring a

real body, which, then, in the final product is missing, in that it

belongs to a different and fatally lost dimension on the threshold

of the invisible, and bearing the seal of death.

The entrance to the ‘inner station’ is like a macabre cinematic

pan-shot taken by an eye potentiated by binocular lens: in the

midst there is Kurtz’s ruined station-home. Marlow stares at the

house – a metaphor of Kurtz’s soul – now almost within reach

of his hand, then, a nearer view shocks him: the fence posts are

topped by natives’ heads, killed, or possibly exterminated in the

name of that progress that cannot be delayed. To Marlow, this

is the tangible proof of the destructive force of the wilderness,

which, seducing the white man to its evil heart, takes vengeance

on the white man for his invasion. Marlow leans over the edge of

that macabre and grotesque abyss, staring at that house of the

person who, during the voyage had gradually attracted his atten-

tion and sympathy, becoming a sort of alter-ego, but now this

last image reveals him as his possible Double: he immediately

starts back, pushing that image into an ‘inaccessible distance’.

His first encounter with Kurtz is also mediated by binoculars,

which recall some cinematic techniques, in that, after a rolled

panorama, Marlow zooms in on Kurtz’s bodily details. Kurtz is

perceived as a spectre, an ‘apparition’, a ‘phantom’, a ‘grotesque’

spectre, ‘the animated image of death’, ‘a shadow on the point of

disappearing’ (p. 59).

Back in Europe, Marlow is left with Kurtz’s letters and the

photograph of his ‘Intended’. It is after looking at the portrait

of the girl that Marlow decides to ‘give her back her portrait and

[Kurtz’s] letters [him]self’. Marlow keenly observes her features

and expression, fully aware that ‘the manipulation of light and

pose’ (p. 71) can alter a photographic subject. But he is sure this

Stevenson6.indb 111 23/10/2009 19:25


is not the case: her beauty strikes him with all her innermost

truthfulness, her ingenuity, candour, generosity, as if that image

reflected also his model of a woman, a woman deprived of any

sensual or erotic appeal. In fact it is this angelic beauty, so imbued

with that spiritualism that early photography interpreted so per-

fectly, that drives him towards ‘the nightmare of [his] choice’,

actually towards another ‘scroll of lighted pictures’ centred on

the return of the dead man. Assuming that Kurtz belongs to the

natural graveyard of memory, he goes to the woman’s house, but

just in front of the house the images of the dead man return.

Finally he sees Kurtz’s image reflected in the glass panel of the

main entrance: his Double emerges as if out of a daguerreotype

mirror with all its vital spirits. The Other claims his right to

belong to him, as if they were the same flesh and blood:

I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor,

and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the

glassy panel – stare with that wide and immense stare

embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I

seemed to hear the whispered cry, ‘The horror! The hor-

ror!’ (Heart of Darkness, p. 72.)

During his encounter with the woman, it is the gloomy expres-

sion of her eyes, foregrounded by her ‘pure brow’, ‘her pale vis-

age’, that again evokes the latent image of Kurtz, until Marlow

views him ‘in the very moment of his death’, and her in her deep

sorrow, and even hears their voices together: a vivid magic lan-

tern phantasmagoric effect:

For her he had only died yesterday. And, by Jove! the

impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed

to have died only yesterday – nay, this very minute: I saw

her and him in the same instant of time –his death and

her sorrow – I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his

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death. Do you understand? I saw them together – I heard

them together. (Heart of Darkness, p. 73.)

The last moment of this encounter creates another spiritistic

effect: in the ‘fading and narrow sheen of the window’, Marlow

remembers the last pose of the woman ‘stretching her arms after

a retreating figure’, and on her Marlow superimposes Kurtz’s

African woman:

She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretch-

ing them black and with clasped pale hands across the

fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him!

I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent

phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a tragic

and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another

one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms,

stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal

stream, the stream of darkness. (Heart of Darkness, p.

75.)

In this vision, which recalls such proto-cinematographic tech-

niques as dissolve and superimposition, exploited in spiritistic

photography, in magic lantern performances, and in early films,

Marlow spectacularises his inner self: while his double blurs into

the background and is delivered to death, the ‘tragic and familiar

shade’ of the Intended is superimposed by the sensual black

woman of the infernal stream, her charms finally neutralised.

Marlow’s speech closes with this optical illusion which suggests

the multiple dimensions of consciousness, and the intriguing

fascination of the invisible to modern man. Though he hates tell-

ing lies, Marlow lets the European fiancé of Kurtz live under the

illusion of Kurtz’s final declaration of love. The return to Europe

means restoring former convictions with the confirmation or

complicity of his own community: he still projects the heart of

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darkness into that ‘ghastly nowhere’, but in the awareness of the

proximity of that wilderness and still haunted by the return of

his Double. Africa and the South Seas make a special observatory

which has helped the white to bring to light his paradoxes: his

Double, and his ‘latent feeling of fellowship which binds together

all humanity’.

In both Stevenson and Conrad, the optical presentation of the

confrontation with the Other illuminates the fragmentariness,

precariousness and subjectivity of representation, but, whereas

in Stevenson the visual sensibility informed by the new visual arts

is developed within the particular context of the anthropological

Other, in Conrad it opens to even more advanced experimental

forms and procedures.

Notes

1 For another study of Stevenson in the South Seas in relation to photography and knowledge, see Ann C. Colley, ‘Lighting Up the Darkness’, in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination (Aldershot: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 99-131. This deals with photography, magic lantern shows and also descriptions of intermittent and discontinuous light, that ‘suggest the incompleteness and discontinuity of knowledge’ (p. 130). For a fuller account of the influences of visual entertainment on Conrad’s work, see Stephen Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

2 In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Utterson presents Enfield’s tale of the horrid encounter with Hyde as a proto-cinematic sequence of pictures, ‘a scroll of lighted pictures’ – R. L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Dent, 1980), p. 11 – reminiscent of a magic lantern entertainment. This particular presentation highlights that reality effect tainted by a sort of spectral evocation of death which early photography created, in this case also adding novel strength to Hyde’s violence, and ‘enslaving’ Utterson’s heart and mind. Photography, daguerreotype as ‘the mirror with memory’, and the magic lantern phantom show, are here associated with the emergence of latency, with the ‘apparition’ of the invisible creature par excellence recalling the Double and death. Hyde haunts and defies the scopic power of

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Law, as represented by Utterson and by the portrait of Jekyll’s father: he does not let the lawyer get possession of his physical features, in fact Utterson complains that he has to rely only on the confused descriptions of few witnesses, whereas a photograph would have been invaluable (p. 21) (even more invaluable would have been fixing Hyde’s image in the mirror in the laboratory as viewed by Jekyll himself). In the end, Hyde gets rid of the gaze of the paternal authority by destroying Jekyll’s father’s portrait (p. 61). The magical function of the magic lantern is pushed to the extreme in the wonderful spectacularisation of the battle of phantoms and devils against the living in ‘The Isle of Voices’, brilliantly combining the realistic and spectral effect of a cinematic western eye with the marvellous of Polynesian folklore.

3 R. L. Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 21-22, hereafter cited in the text as South Seas. See also pp. 101-2.

4 R. L. Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in R. L. Stevenson: The Complete Short Stories, ed. by Ian Bell (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing 1993), vol 2, pp. 353-354, hereafter cited in the text as ‘Falesá’.

5 Particularly cinematic, and photographic, is Marlow’s first encounter with Kurtz, in that the impressions, like early photography, seem to capture and fix the body’s spectre or emanations, in this case a sequence of moving pictures freezing on the last one: ‘Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of men appeared, as though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight to the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human beings – of naked human beings – with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into the clearing by the darkfaced and pensive forest. The bushes shook, the grass swayed for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive immobility’ – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. by R. Kimbrough (London: Norton, 1988), pp. 58-9, hereafter cited in the text.

6 Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, in J. Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ed. by R. Kimbrough, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 145.

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117Largeaud-Ortega

Stevenson’s ‘little tale’ is ‘a library’: an anthropological approach to ‘The Beach of Falesá’

Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega

Since its origins with Bougainville in 1771, traditional South

Sea literature’s sole purpose had been to make the fantasies of

the West come true: witness Melville’s Typee (1846) and Omoo

(1847), Stoddard’s South Sea Idylls (1873) and Loti’s Marriage

de Loti (1880). The first writer who permanently settled in the

Pacific, R. L. Stevenson was also the first writer who broke away

from this tradition and practised extensively what anthropolo-

gists some 30 years onward were to name ‘participating observa-

tion’.1 For this reason, I suggest that his later South Sea fiction

– namely ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891), ‘The Isle of Voices’ (1893), ‘The

Beach of Falesá’ (1893) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) – should be

viewed as examples of ‘anthropological fiction’.2

During the six and a half years he spent in the Pacific (1888-

1894), Stevenson, like an anthropologist, was eager to mix with

the natives: he learnt the Polynesian languages – which all have a

common basis from Hawai’i to Tahiti, New-Zealand, Easter Island

and Samoa – and he researched into Polynesian social customs,

sacred rites and mythology. His long stays with native cultural

informants like Donat-Rimarau in Fakarava, or King Kalakaua

in Hawai’i resulted in an extensive knowledge of Polynesian lore,

which he continued to study when he became a resident in the

Samoan archipelago, keeping constant company with the native

staff in his large homestead, with the many island chiefs whom

he strongly supported, and with the Samoan visitors who daily

flocked to his home, Vailima. By modern standards, Stevenson

can be called a pioneering anthropologist of the Pacific, as Ashley

Stevenson6.indb 117 23/10/2009 19:25


argues:

the work of ethnographic flâneurs like [. . .] Stevenson,

living among the people about whom they wrote over a

space of years, learning the language, hoping for some

kind of understanding from the inside, should be incor-

porated within the histories of anthropology, or the rich

cultural context in which the discipline was founded risks

being thinned.3

Stevenson identified one thing that was fundamental to pre-

European Pacific societies: originally, everything was sacred.

Each individual could relate to the gods and to cosmogony, so

that there was no such notion as individualism in Polynesia

of old. Each and every one belonged to an extended family, or

group, which belonged to a larger group or village, which in turn

belonged to a still much wider group that eventually reached

back to the divine origins of time. Echoes of all this may be found

in the author’s later South Sea narratives.

This paper focuses on ‘The Beach of Falesá’, presenting it as an

anthropological novella written with the aim (among others) of

showing the West how to acquire a better knowledge of the South

Seas. As Stevenson rightfully boasted in a letter to Colvin, ‘You

will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little

tale, than if you had read a library’. I will attempt to show that

‘The Beach of Falesá’ can be seen as an ‘anthropological library’

of the South Seas. I suggest browsing through different shelves

of this library, from a new reading perspective that incorporates

some of the anthropological knowledge Stevenson acquired.

It includes a study of the onomastics of Polynesian character-

names and considerations of social customs and sacred rites. I

aim to show there is much more to ‘The Beach of Falesá’ than

meets Western eyes: a Polynesian tale closely interwoven with a

Western one.

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119Largeaud-Ortega

First, onomastics: much is conveyed by the meanings and con-

notations of the Polynesian names in the story.4 Consider for

instance the heroine’s name, Uma. In Tahitian, uma as a noun

refers to ‘a discreet signal, a secret warning’. Uma indeed guides

her British husband, the narrator Wiltshire, through the South

Seas, in order to initiate him to that area. This metaphorically

appears from the start of the novella: ‘[she] ran ahead of me, and

stopped and looked back and smiled and ran ahead of me again,

thus guiding me through the edge of the bush, and by a quiet way

to my own house’.5 Uma’s role as a guide is confirmed throughout

till the final climatic action when she rushes up the taboo moun-

tain at night – ‘[she] lit right out to come and warn me’ (p. 63)

– and gives her husband a ‘secret warning’ which saves his life.

As a verb, uma means ‘to dig’ in Tahitian. Uma’s role may be

said to metaphorically dig the Polynesian soil to try and root her

rootless husband who has come from the sea, all the more so as

Wiltshire’s name pronounced the Polynesian way is ‘Vilivili’ (p.

57), and in Hawaiian, vilivili designates very light wood to make

canoes with, or seeds that are adrift. In Polynesia, the metaphor

of the drifting seed is often derogatively applied to foreigners

who have no roots in the islands. Uma-the-digger’s task is to help

drifting Vilivili take root in Polynesia. In Samoan, vilivili also sig-

nifies ‘to spin, to wheel’, but also ‘to strive or compete’, which, as

Kramer remarks, ‘quite aptly describes Wiltshire’s behaviour’.6

The verb uma in Hawaiian also means ‘to fight, to struggle’,

which is precisely what Uma does, following Wiltshire’s foot-

steps, when she bravely fights her way up the taboo mountain

– ‘she was all knocked and bruised’ (p. 63) – in order to try and

secure her husband’s future in Falesá.

In Hawaiian, the noun uma means ‘chest’, ‘breast’, and figura-

tively, ‘heart’ and ‘generosity’. This underlines Uma’s symbolic

role as the nourishing mother – Wiltshire’s cherished ‘A 1 wife’

(p. 71) and the mother of their large half-caste family, so generous

‘she would give the roof off the station’ (p. 70). Taken literally, ‘A’

Stevenson6.indb 119 23/10/2009 19:25


and ‘1’ suggest that Uma stands for the beginnings of Creation –

she embodies nourishing Mother Earth.

This is confirmed by the Samoan meanings of uma: ‘whole’,

‘entire’, as in the expression ‘O Sāmoa uma, which designates

‘the whole Samoan archipelago’; as a verb, an adjective or an

adverb, uma means‘to end’ and ‘final(ly)’ or ‘eternal(ly)’ – as a

noun, it means ‘the infinite’.7 It may be inferred once again that

Uma symbolises all Polynesian women, ‘O vahine uma,8 she is the

primal South Sea woman, Mother Earth incarnated. By choosing

this name for his heroine, Tusitala provided a major clue, prod-

ding Western readers into following Wiltshire’s steps in order to

try and ‘know more about the South Seas’.

A selective study of onomastics in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ con-

tributes to a small part of a first shelf in Stevenson’s anthropo-

logical ‘library’. Other shelves are occupied by commentaries

on Wiltshire and Uma’s wedding scene, which centres on the

following marriage contract:

This is to certify that Uma daughter of Fa’avao of Falesa

island of -----, is illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for

one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her

to hell next morning.

John Blackamoor

Chaplain to the Hulks

Extracted from the register

By William T. Randall

Master Mariner.

(p. 11)

At first sight, this key passage is bound to be read from a

Western point of view, and may be introduced in this way.

Wiltshire is a white trader who has just arrived in Falesá. Upon

his landing, he is greeted by a rival trader, Case, who immediately

urges him to pretend to marry an island girl, Uma, taking great

care to hide from him that she is tabooed and that, consequently,

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Wiltshire will be tabooed too and unable to trade with the villag-

ers. Wiltshire is only too eager to agree, complies with the fake

wedding ceremony, and obligingly signs the marriage contract.

The girl, for her part, believes the wedding ceremony is genuine,

as she can neither read nor understand the certificate that states

that she is ‘illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for one night’.

This notorious marriage contract can be compared to other

legal-sounding instruments used by colonial powers to appropri-

ate land and resources, for example the infamous agreement on a

much larger scale which was signed between British administra-

tors and Polynesian chiefs in New Zealand in 1840, namely, the

Treaty of Waitangi. That contract was unashamedly presented in

their own language to the Maori of the time as ‘Queen Victoria’s

act of love to you’.9 The British signatories were eager (like Case)

to exclude rival Western trading powers from the island in the

context of fierce colonial competition, and (like Wiltshire) to lay

an exclusive claim on the object of their pursuit – in that instance,

the riches of the island. And (like Uma) the island chiefs could

neither read nor understand English, so they signed the so-called

‘love contract’ blindly.

A Western reading of the wedding scene will clearly be in terms

of the hypocrisy and injustice of colonialism. It greatly shocked

Stevenson’s contemporary readers, as the marriage contract

unmistakably gave the lie to the civilising mission the West

claimed to carry out among benighted islanders: ‘the empire

existed to civilise and uplift its subjects, or so its champions

claimed’.10 Although Stevenson had actually been a witness to the

very same kind of fraudulent marriage contract on his South Sea

wanderings11 the contract he presented in his fiction was totally

disbelieved, wildly criticised at the time, and bowdlerised by the

publishers.

Nevertheless, what Western readers generally failed to grasp

in this emblematic passage was the anthropological information

it conveys, which is at least as important as its anti-imperialist

Stevenson6.indb 121 23/10/2009 19:25


message, and which calls for a Polynesian reading of the scene.

This standpoint reveals that there is much more to Uma than

the obvious clichés of the beautiful bare-breasted vahine12 and

of the Noble Savage who ‘carried it the way a countess might, so

proud and humble’ (p. 12). Because Uma believes the wedding

ceremony is genuine, she and her mother dutifully perform the

necessary Polynesian wedding rituals. To start with, marriages

were prearranged by the bride’s parents; so Case, true to typi-

cally colonialist conduct, sets himself up as a father figure: ‘I’ll

make it square with the old lady’ (p. 7). Uma’s mother, Fa’avao,

thereupon makes her appearance:

a strange old native woman crawled into the house

almost on her belly. [. . .] She said no plain word, but

smacked and mumbled with her lips, and hummed

aloud, like a child over a Christmas pudding. [Then]

she slipped into a kind of song [. . .]; the song rose into

a cry, and stopped; the woman crouched out of the

house the same way she came in. (pp. 9-10)

Newly-arrived Wiltshire is dumbfounded at what he terms the

old woman’s ‘rum manners’ (p. 10). Had the bridegroom been

Polynesian, however, Fa’avao’s behaviour would have seemed

only natural. First, crouching in and out of a room was com-

pletely in keeping with Polynesian customs, which considered

it offensive to be standing inside a house or even when moving

in and out of it. One had to bend down to show respect to the

others. Second, those ‘manners’ were actually the first stages of

a Polynesian wedding ritual. In Tahitian, fa’ava’o means ‘orator,

master of ceremonies’. So Fa’avao dutifully chants the bride and

bridegroom’s genealogy, as was the custom, and as is perceived

by the owner of the house, a long-standing South Sea resident:

‘the captain told me she was making up a quantity of poetry in

my praise because I was to marry Uma’ (p. 10).

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Fa’avao’s appearance – ‘her face was tattooed, which was not the

practice in that island’ (p. 9) – informs the reader about the status

of herself and Uma as out-islanders in Falesá: ‘[Uma] was born

in one of the Line Islands’ (p. 30), north-east of Samoa.13 There is

another woman coming from an outer island in the novella: Case’s

wife. ‘She was a Samoa woman [. . .]; and when [Case] came to die

[. . .] she went off home in the schooner Manu’a’ (p. 5). Because

she sails home in a schooner named Manu’a, it may be inferred

that Case’s wife comes from the island of the same name, Manu’a,

Samoa’s easternmost island. These three native women were born

in the East – hence the question: what do eastern origins imply

in terms of Polynesian history and mythology? In Polynesian

migration history, the East was the direction of new conquests

from when, around 2,000 B. C., the Polynesian people started

their exploratory voyages from South-East Asia and gradually

expanded eastwards in the uncharted Pacific.14 The East was ‘the

direction of a renewal, of life, and [. . .] consequently a direction

that [was] worth exploring. The “land of light” might be there’.15

So, from a historical point of view, the three women from the East

symbolise a new birth, the call of the wild and of new promising

perspectives.16

In addition, in Polynesian cosmogony, the East was the place of

divine origins. In Samoa, the island Manu’a is known as the very

first island the primal god Tagaloa created on earth, and the place

where he decided to make his sacred home.17 It follows that from

a mythological point of view, women from the East symbolised

primal women, the bearers of creation, the divine solar principle.

‘Sacred home’ translates in Samoan into fale sā (with a macron on

the a to indicate a long vowel).18 There is no place named Falesā

in Polynesia: it’s a nonexistent place, a utopia in the etymological

sense, whose name Stevenson composed from Samoan words.

So one can imagine that Falesā-the-sacred-home, is a replica of

Manu’a, Tagaloa’s sacred home on earth, which itself is a replica of

the primal god’s original sacred home in heaven. In other words,

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Falesā represents primal sacred Polynesia. It is the original island,

a metonymy of the South Seas, a symbol of all Polynesian islands.

Falesā is ō fanua uma, ‘all the islands’, ‘the whole of Polynesia’

– a geographical and cultural equivalent to Uma herself. As an

epitome of the South Seas, it is very probably what Stevenson had

in mind when he wrote to Colvin, ‘You will know more about the

South Seas after you have read my little tale, than if you had read

a library.’

Uma’s role, as a woman coming from the East, the area of

Samoan origins, is to help her foreign husband build their new

home in Falesā. Their house is ‘the last house to the east’, a fit

place for life to start anew. As a consequence, their home can

be viewed as a new sacred home, a fale sā, for a hybrid Western

and Polynesian couple. The whole novella ‘The Beach of Falesá’

can thus be read – or heard – as the genealogical chant of a new

hybrid family being born in the South Seas. It combines in its title

‘the beach’, which represents the profane white community,19 and

fale sā, the sacred Polynesian community. It therefore offers a

hybrid and very much true-to-life picture of the South Seas at the

end of the 19th century.

In the context of Polynesian wedding rituals, Uma conforms to

tradition through ceremonial adornments and gifts, which I now

propose to analyse. First, she makes a display of flowers: ‘[s]he

was scented [. . .]; her bust, [. . .] she wore bare only for some half a

dozen necklaces of seeds and flowers’ (p. 11). In ancient Polynesia,

fragrance was a privileged means to communicate with gods. The

flowers’ scent gave access to the mana, or spiritual power, and

Uma’s wedding flowers were a compulsory ritual endowment, a

perfumed prayer addressed to the gods of fecundity. Uma’s second

ceremonial contribution is tapa: ‘her kilt was of fine tapa, looking

richer in the folds than any silk’ (p. 11). Tapa is a piece of bark-

cloth, ritually beaten by women into a cloth-like thinness, which

was only exhibited on ceremonial occasions.20 When Uma adorns

herself with tapa, she certifies the cultural validity of her wedding.

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Anthropologist Marcel Mauss calls tapa ‘a mana object’:21 as Uma’s

tapa marks the sacredness of the event, grants Wiltshire the right

to possess her and allows him into her whole family line, down to

the origins of times. Not unlike a Western family tree – though

on a much larger scale – tapa symbolises genealogy: its fine fibres

stand for ancestry lines and their descendants. In the words of

Young Leslie, tapa denotes genealogical wealth: ‘The cloth wealth

stands in, analogically and metonymically, for the maternal kin,

and represents the potential fecundity of her line, for many future

generations’.22 Stevenson was well aware of the symbolic values of

Polynesian cloth, as can be noted in his presentation of a former

pretender of Uma’s: ‘He was a small chief, and had some fine mats

and old songs in his family’ (p. 31). Traditionally, tapa, together

with ‘fine mats and old songs’, were used conjointly to extol one’s

genealogical wealth. Vegetal strands and lines of oratory inter-

wove to pay tribute to successive genealogies. Bearing in mind

that, in Polynesia of old, there was no such thing as an individual,

and that everyone was related to primal gods, Uma’s gorgeous

tapa represents the history of her ancestry as far back as original

times, down to primal gods. Since Uma comes from the East, her

genealogy is highly sacred, hence the outstanding beauty of her

barkcloth, ‘richer in the folds than any silk’. Wiltshire could hope

for no better gift of introduction to the South Seas.

At this point we may make a fleeting comparison with Kirstie in

the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (written in Samoa):

[she] knows the legend of her own family, and may count

kinship with some illustrious dead. For it is the mark

of the Scot of all classes: that he [. . .] remembers and

cherishes the memory of his forefathers, good or bad; and

there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead

even to the twentieth generation. [. . .] They were all, and

Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the

particulars of their genealogy.23

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Scottish Stevenson in Samoa knew that tracing their roots

was fundamental to both Polynesians and Scots. Anthropologist

Mauss compares tapa to a European coat-of-arms24 since, like a

coat-of-arms, tapa bears the history and the symbols of a clan

or an extended family. As a writer of anthropological fiction,

Stevenson could thus draw attention to what Lévi-Strauss calls

‘the unconscious structure’25 of diverse cultures, and in a pio-

neering way point to a closeness between the peoples from both

sides of the earth.

Uma’s third appropriate ceremonial contribution consists of a

gift of herself: offering herself up as a pig, ‘I belong you all-e-same

pig!’ (p. 13), she cries to Wiltshire in Beach la mar.26 In ancient

Polynesia, pigs were an incarnation of a minor god, Kamapua’a,

who was himself a representative on earth of the god of fertility,

Lono. Kamapua’a was half human, half pig, as his name indicates

– proto-Polynesian kama or tama meaning ‘human child’ and

pua’a, ‘pig’ – so that sacrificing a pig had connotations of human

sacrifice. By offering herself as a pig to Wiltshire, Uma offers ‘a

part of [her]self’ to the god of fertility.27 The implied prayer is:

may the god grant her husband be a father of an island progeny

in return. Moreover, the gift of pigs is also connected with a

passage from darkness to light: in order to be offered, pigs were

brought from the pigsty to the front of the house, namely from

darkness to light.28 This passage from darkness to light was the

axiom of Polynesian cosmogony: it re-enacted primal Creation.

The source of the darkness that made darkness

The source of the night that made night

The intense darkness, the deep darkness [. . .]

Darkness slips into light [. . .]

Child of the night of black darkness is born

The night gives birth.29

Uma offers herself as a pig at the moment when the couple reach

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their nuptial home, to which she has guided her husband through

the night. It may be said that the newly-weds are thus brought

from darkness to light: ‘her shadow went all the way up behind

her into the hollow of the iron roof; she stood against it bright,

the lamplight shining on her skin’ (pp. 12-13). Aggrandised by a

huge black halo, with her dark skin illuminated, primal Uma may

be seen as the sacred night, the Pō, from where light originated

according to Pacific cosmogony. Through her wedding gifts, Uma

repeats this genesis, persistently encouraging her husband to

root himself in Polynesia.

All these ritualistic messages are lost on Wiltshire – just as

they are lost on Western readers ignorant of Polynesian ways.

For these Western readers, the wedding scene may be summed

up as follows: we have, on one side, a bridegroom who is familiar

with Western wedding rituals and therefore knows he is the

signatory of a fallacious marriage contract, and on the other

side, a native bride who is starkly ignorant of those rituals and

cheated into believing that her wedding ceremony is genuine.

For Polynesian readers, however, the summary could run thus:

an island bride dutifully performs the local rites pertaining to a

genuine Polynesian wedding, while the Western bridegroom fails

to realise that he is being earnestly implicated in an authentic

South Sea wedding ceremony. Fundamentally, this major scene

is based on a mutual cultural misunderstanding. On the one

hand, Uma cannot read the marriage certificate. But on the other

hand, Wiltshire cannot read Uma’s cultural signs either: his

mother-in-law’s prayers, his wife’s flowers, tapa and gift of a pig

– all are a closed book to him. So in actual fact, both characters

are just as uneducated as the other, both are equally ignorant

of the other’s culture. Exactly like the Western hero, Wiltshire,

the Western readers who are not informed about Polynesian rites

and customs may prove as uneducated, and may fail to grasp an

important aspect of this scene.

I suggest that Stevenson’s key purpose in this scene from ‘The

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Beach of Falesá’ was to provide those readers who wished to ‘know

more about the South Seas’ with an extremely powerful image: a

metaphor of the act of reading South Sea fiction. It stresses the

necessity of a hybrid approach: both Western and Polynesian.

Such may be Stevenson’s most solemn message in all his later

South Sea writings: each one of us needs to be instructed in the

Other’s culture. The wedding scene in ‘The Beach of Falesá’, as

part of Stevenson’s anthropological ‘library’, actually contains

two texts. One text which proclaims itself openly to the West: it

tells a plain tale that can be instantly and easily recognised – a

kind of Jekyll text (to make an easy and therefore summary com-

parison based on a popular opposition). And one text that lurks

underneath, a text that lies in the shadow of the obvious one, one

that needs to be ferreted out but is nevertheless of paramount

importance – a Hyde text, I might say (if I am very careful to

suppress the negative connotations conveyed by this expres-

sion). The more accessible first text exhibits Uma’s ignorance

and gullibility. The more cryptic second text unveils Wiltshire’s

equivalent ignorance and gullibility30 – there is anti-imperialism

and cultural relativism with a vengeance for late 19th century

Western readers. To those who might patronisingly feel inclined

to scoff at native Uma because she cannot read, Stevenson slyly

addresses the question: ‘Are you quite sure you can read?’ To be

able to better decipher this wedding scene, as well as the whole

novella, one needs to have access to both cultures, Western and

Polynesian. In other words, one needs to be acquainted with

some of the anthropological knowledge Stevenson had enthusi-

astically acquired about the South Seas.

My last point in the study of the wedding scene is this: because

the wedding is, quite strikingly, situated at the beginning of the

novella, it proves to be only one first stage in Wiltshire’s – and

the readers’ – rites of passage to Polynesia. Under the guidance of

Uma, the ceremony is but a stepping stone to the hero’s appren-

ticeship in Falesá. The autobiographical narrative subsequently

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takes hero and readers along successive ‘voyage[s] of discovery’

(p. 51), and those subsequent rites of passage supply Stevenson’s

anthropological ‘library’ with a substantial number of additional

volumes. At the end of the novella, both cultures no longer stand

parallel and unbeknown to each other, but ultimately join in the

narrator’s persona.

The fact that ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is a first-person narrative

makes this point even more striking, as readers are called upon

to mark the difference between Wiltshire’s narrated-I – the way

he perceived things in the narrated past – and his narrating-I –

the way he perceives things in the narrating present. Wiltshire as

the narrating character who tells his tale some twenty years after

the events is definitely, although grudgingly, more aware of and

more amenable to Polynesian lore than he was as a newly-arrived

narrated character. He has, then, more or less successfully, gone

through all his successive rites of passage. While Wiltshire

depicts the natives as the Others, he himself, as a white man, has

also unwittingly become somewhat Other. Given access to the

core of Polynesia, the narrator tells a tale which allows his fellow

Western contemporaries to learn, in their turn, about the Pacific.

Stevenson’s most earnest wish may have been that Western read-

ers might follow in Wiltshire’s footsteps, and likewise become

somewhat Other. This wish is clearly expressed in a letter to

Sydney Colvin:

Please remember that my life passes among my ‘blacks or

chocolates’. [. . .] You must try to exercise a trifle of imagi-

nation, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some

sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write

to you? I think you are truly a little too cockney with me. 31

Wiltshire’s narrative turns out to be a symbolic return,

or counter-gift, to the Pacific, a fundamental notion in pre-

European Polynesian societies. True to South Sea traditions,

Stevenson6.indb 129 23/10/2009 19:25


Stevenson makes the hero deliver a story which is meant to start

a dialogue between the West and the Pacific, in search of mutu-

ally significant Others. The novella concludes with Uma and

Wiltshire being doubly blessed by a Polynesian high chief and

a white Protestant missionary who have conjointly taught them

– and Western readers – how to read hybrid late 19th-century

secular and sacred, written and oral, South Sea texts. In return,

Wiltshire tells the couple’s own tale so that the rest of the world

will know better the South Seas. Their half-caste children are a

potent symbol of the South Seas’ future which, tellingly enough,

may all be contained in the novella’s concluding question mark.

As a ground-breaking anthropological novelist, Stevenson would

not impose his own views as a white man on either Western or

Polynesian communities. The question is left open for the future,

engaging others to try and ‘know more about the South Seas after

you have read my little tale’.

To conclude, I have consistently been asked if Stevenson really

acquired as much anthropological understanding as I am claim-

ing. My answer is yes, as most Stevenson biographers testify: he

did collect an immense amount of information about Polynesian

beliefs and traditions from all over the South Seas. What’s more,

his foremost intent in the Pacific was to write a vastly ambitious

piece of anthropological work, against the advice of his wife

and most of his Western advisors from Britain and the States.

Witness this letter from his wife Fanny to Sydney Colvin:

Louis has the most enchanting material than anyone ever

had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he’s

going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson

head, that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book

must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal

thing.32

A difficult task was lying ahead of him, as he confided to Henry

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James as early as 1890: ‘Think of writing books of travels on the

spot, when I am continually extending my information, revising

my opinions, and seeing the most finely finished portions of my

work come part to part in pieces’.33 Sadly, Stevenson died before

he had a chance to finish even taking down notes. Only a few of

those are left to modern day readers, collected under the post-

humously published title In the South Seas. Had this vast book

been completed, it would have been a significant further contri-

bution to Stevenson’s anthropological ‘library’. What readers do

have, though, is ‘The Beach of Falesá’: an outstanding piece of

anthropological fiction about Polynesia, to help Westerners and

islanders alike to try and build a multicultural world, according

to Stevenson’s wishes. The novella is like ‘Uma’, meaning in

Tahitian, we remember, ‘a discreet signal, a secret warning’: it

signals to the West there is a whole ‘library’ waiting to be read,

and continued, in the Pacific.

Stevenson6.indb 131 23/10/2009 19:25


Notes

1 Bronislaw Malinowski, Les Argonautes du Pacifique Occidental (Paris: Gallimard, 1922).

2 I suggest a distinction between Stevenson’s The Wrecker (1892, but started as early as summer 1889; see Roger Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 130) and later, more anthropologically sensitive works listed in the text.

3 Scott Ashley, ‘The Poetics of Race in 1890s Ireland: an Ethnography of the Aran Islands’, Patterns of Prejudice 35.ii (2001), 5-18 (p. 18).

4 For a previous study of names in ‘Falesá’, see Jürgen Kramer, ‘The Strange/r Case of ‘The Beach of Falesá’: a reading of R. L. Stevenson’s first realistic South Sea story’, in Neue Brennpunkte des Englischunterrichts, ed. by Dieter Buttjes et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 80-83.

5 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Beach of Falesá’ in South Sea Tales, ed. by Roslyn Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 12. Henceforth cited in the text by page number only.

6 Kramer, p. 80.

7 G. B. Milner, Samoan Dictionary, Samoan-English – English-Samoan (Auckland: Pasifika Press, 2003), p. 300.

8 ‘O vahine uma: in Samoan means ‘all women’, or ‘the whole female principle’.

9 Claudia Orange, The Story of a Treaty (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books, 2005), p. 18.

10 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Abacus, 1997), p. xiv.

11 Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, ed. Neil Rennie (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 200.

12 Vahine: ‘woman’ in Proto-Polynesian.

13 ‘The Line Islands’, now the Kiribati Republic, lie astride the Equator, hence their former name.

14 Matthew Spriggs, ‘Archéologie Insulaire’, in Le Pacifique ou l’Odyssée de l’Espèce. Bilan Civilisationniste du Grand Océan, ed. by Serge Dunis (Paris: Kliencksieck, 1996), 19-37 (p. 28).

15 Serge Tcherkézoff, Faa Samoa, une Identité Polynésienne.

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133Largeaud-Ortega

L’Anthropologie comme Dialogue Culturel (Paris: L’Harmattan, Connaissance des Hommes, 2003), p. 39.

16 Ben Finney, ‘De l’Océan à l’Espace’, in Le Pacifique ou l’Odyssée de l’Espèce, 39-59 (p. 46).

17 Tcherkézoff, p.360.

18 In the 19th century, accented vowel letters were used to indicate long vowels, so, in accordance with the common usage of the time, Stevenson uses an accented-a in ‘Falesá’ (My thanks to Richard Dury for this information). Nowadays long vowels are indicated by a macron over the vowel, so ‘Falesá’ would be spelt ‘Falesā’.

19 Roslyn Jolly ‘Notes’, in Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales, ed. by Roslyn Jolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 259.

20 Tcherkézoff, p. 341.

21 Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don, forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, Année Sociologique n.s. 1 (1923-1924), reprinted in Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, Quadrige / Presses Universitaires de France, 1950, transl. W. D. Halls, The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge 1990), p. 157.

22 Heather Young Leslie, ‘Bons Baisers de Samoa: les bonites de Hina et le Tu’iha’angana de Tonga’, Bulletin de la Société des Études Océaniennes, 303/304 (2005), p. 116.

23 Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 53.

24 Mauss, 161.

25 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Introduction à l’Œuvre de Marcel Mauss’, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: P. U. F.. 1950), ix-lii (p. xxvii).

26 Beach la mar: Pacific island pidgin.

27 Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice, Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 48-49.

28 Tcherkézoff, p. 46.

29 Martha Warren Beckwith (transl. and ed.), The Kumulipo, a Hawaiian Creation Chant (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1972), p. 77.

30 Wiltshire is not gulled by Uma, but by Case, who knows as well as she

Stevenson6.indb 133 23/10/2009 19:25


does that her wedding rites are in earnest

31 24 or 25 April 1994, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994-95), VIII, 281. ‘Blacks or chocolates’ is a quotation from Colvin’s letter to Stevenson dated 21 March 1894: ‘for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts, or so it often seems, from the main currents of human affairs’ (qu. in Letters VIII: 279 n 1).

32 21 May 1889, qu. in Letters VI, 303-304.

33 29 December 1890, Letters VII, 65-66.

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135Ratnapalan

Stevenson’s anthropology of the Pacific Islands

Laavanyan Ratnapalan

In 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson undertook a writer’s tour of

the South Seas, with the aim of producing a book that combined

ethnological information collected from the region with his own

reflections, to form a kind of ‘hydrographical memoir’.1 The

production of this work broke down in the following two years

and scholars have continued to study the reasons as to why this

happened; in addition to the biographical and literary historical

uses of the knowledge gained from their enquiry, Stevenson’s

failure to write a ‘Big Book’ about the South Seas also helps to

clarify some of the limitations of anthropology, both in the nine-

teenth century as well as today. In particular, his work expresses

familiarity with, and hesitancy towards, the emergent science

of evolutionary anthropology, which would come to ground

modern theorizations of historical and social change. He was by

no means an advocate of the strictly teleological view of human

development, and regarded the entry of positivist thought into

the study of culture with caution. In addition to adopting a criti-

cal perspective with regard to contemporary scientific anthro-

pology, his aesthetic portrayals of islander life and the intimate

observations of his encounters with people living in the Pacific,

expresses a strong affinity with a different orientation of research

into the nature of humankind, which can broadly be understood

as ‘philosophical anthropology’.

Although there was a powerful progressive discourse of cul-

ture in Europe during the later nineteenth century, which was

principally motivated by the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert

Spencer, many writers nevertheless questioned its philosophical

Stevenson6.indb 135 23/10/2009 19:25


and moral foundations, and it is here that Stevenson’s work on

the South Seas must also be situated. Though he was interested

in the ethnological theories of the time, Stevenson nevertheless

developed his own anthropological outlook intuitively and with-

out obvious debt to any particular scientific theory. All the same,

it is undeniably clear that as an author he expressed an existen-

tial understanding of human life that was based on continental

philosophy and phenomenological study. In this respect, the

questions that remained important to Stevenson during the later

years of the nineteenth century were moved by the same spirit

of wonder at the human condition that illuminated the thought

of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and which may

be expressed in terms of a turning away from positivist and

enumerative methods of research, towards a poetic renewal of

the study of existence. Given the subtle weight of these concerns

within his work, it is with characteristic sincerity and insight that

Stevenson claimed to find ‘man most interesting’ in the South

Seas.2

The focus of the present paper will be three-fold: to examine

Stevenson’s research into the contradictions and contrariness

of life, both through the study of art and of human societies; to

explore his rejection of the anthropological category of survivals

as a way of explaining historical progress; and to understand his

grounding of anthropological research in the encounter between

people and their surrounding world.

The nuanced and reflective style of the South Seas writing was

the product, not only of years of aesthetic refinement, but more

importantly of a lifetime of study into the metaphysical questions

that animated Stevenson’s interest in the phenomenal world.

From a youthful age he demonstrated an equivocal reading of

natural phenomena and he was fascinated by the sometimes

fragmented, kaleidoscopic forms that he found there. In the

significant early essay, ‘Pan’s Pipes’ (1878), he explained how in

the figure of Pan – ‘the god of Nature’ – the ancient Greeks had

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‘uttered the last word of human experience.’3 This strange rural

deity could be seen ‘now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies

were dispersed; now by the woodside on a Summer noon trolling

on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen.’

He links Hellenic myth with psychology by then adding: ‘What

experience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and the choosing mind

has much to reject before it can get together the materials of a

theory.’ Pan is therefore seen to express the contradictions that

are a part of everyday human life, and in the appropriation of

this being from the netherworld, Stevenson displays a creative

interest in the workings of consciousness.

The deployment of aesthetic means to express philosophical

ideas is a central feature of his work, and it can be found again in

the important 1883 essay entitled ‘San Francisco’. There is a sign

of his later portrayals of beachcomber locales in the description

of this modern Pacific capital, in which he notes, ‘everywhere

the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things

yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall’.4 As with many of

his landscape interpretations, the impression received is one of

the town being simultaneously in a developing and deteriorating

state. The philosophical richness of this insight is gained at the

expense of an unqualified optimism, since his writing is moti-

vated by an inner conflict between growing and declining things.

The author’s later glimpses into the hybridity of modern life in

the Pacific are similarly characterised by dissatisfaction with

merely celebrating contemporary societies, and it is fruitful to

examine the moments of hesitation and uncertainty contained in

this work, to try and represent such moments within the history

of his time.

Stevenson’s concerns with developments in the academic

study of anthropology are informed by a Hegelian view of the

material world, and in his constructive response to the phi-

losophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) he aligns

himself with some of the most important thinkers of nineteenth

Stevenson6.indb 137 23/10/2009 19:25


century Europe. Even without the intervention of Hegel, how-

ever – as noted in the essay on Pan – Stevenson understood

how the observation of oppositions in interpreting the world,

relate to the observer’s process of reconciling new information

within an existing world-view. To be sure, early in his life he had

been dismissive of Hegelian philosophy: in a letter to his cousin

of 6 September 1868, he even claimed that Hegel was ‘a most

egregious ass.’5 But later, in 1883-84, an exchange of letters

between Stevenson and his father reveals a change in his views.

To Thomas Stevenson he wrote on 20 Dec 1883 that Hegel ‘got

the best word of all philosophy with his antinomies’, explaining

that, “the contrary of everything is its postulate. That [. . .] gives

a hint of the idea, which contains a great deal of the mysteries of

religion, and a vast amount of the practical wisdom of life.’6 To

which his father replied, on 23 Dec 1883:

As to Hegel and his ‘secret’ I really know nothing but

the only prescription I know for black views of life is the

Gospel of Jesus Christ and when that doesn’t light up the

scene I fear Hegel is not likely to do so.7

The tacit reference in Thomas Stevenson’s letter to Hegel’s

‘secret’ is a book by J. H. Stirling, entitled The Secret of Hegel

(1865), an influential work of the time, in which the Scottish phi-

losopher had attempted to explain Hegel to a perplexed British

reading public.8

Hegel’s philosophy was earliest and most enthusiastically sup-

ported in Britain by Scottish thinkers.9 James Frederick Ferrier

(1808-64), who read and admired Hegel’s work, had taught the

folklorist Andrew Lang moral philosophy and economics at St.

Andrews in 1861, and was the father of Stevenson’s friends,

James Walter and Elizabeth. William Wallace (1844-97), who

was also a student of Ferrier’s at St. Andrews, went on to become

professor of moral philosophy at Oxford. Wallace is chiefly

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139Ratnapalan

remembered for having translated Hegel’s Logic as the first part

of his Encyclopaedia of the Human Sciences (1874). In addition

to being regarded as the advent of British Hegelianism, this was

also the first English translation of Hegel’s discussion of the anti-

nomies of reason, to which Stevenson had referred in the letter

to his father. The other possibility is that Stevenson, who read

German, had studied Hegel in the philosopher’s mother tongue.

In his discussion of the antinomies, Hegel disputes the findings

of Immanuel Kant by stating that the categories of thought are

the same as those of reality: ‘every actual thing involves a coexist-

ence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other

words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious

of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.’10 For Hegel,

contra Kant, the fact that the world is composed of ‘a coexistence

of opposed elements’ means that it reflects the state to which the

human mind is led in its pursuit of antinomies drawn from clas-

sical philosophy.11 Stevenson understood from Hegel’s argument

that the antinomial nature of human reason points to the conclu-

sion wherein the truth about the self is to be found in the world

created by the mind. Anthropology and scientific discovery, thus

take on a responsibility distinctly different to that identified by

Darwin and Spencer, and move in the direction not of teleologi-

cal species, but existential experience. More precisely, it is this

shift from the objective study of species to the experience of the

phenomenal world that marks the tradition of philosophical

anthropology and also Stevenson’s writing on the Pacific Islands.

If the Hegelian influence in his thinking is followed, then it will

be possible to see in what way Stevenson’s writing throughout

the pages of In the South Seas is also characterized by contradic-

tion and provisionality. The island landscape is presented as a

continuously shifting movement of tones, which progresses with

the passage of the observer through space. Such an aesthetic

compels Stevenson one night, on Fakarava in the Paumotus

Islands, to describe the ‘vigorous and scattered lights’ of the

Stevenson6.indb 139 23/10/2009 19:25


moon shining through the palm canopy (South Seas, pp. 152-3).

He takes delight in depicting the break-up of colour, not only to

emphasise contrast, but in order to assert it as a pattern that is

filled with dynamic vigour. The pure moonlight is shown actually

to be frangible as it breaks through the palm canopy to scatter

into fragments of light. Clear perception of form is arrested by

kaleidoscopic colour. To take another example: while in the

Marquesas Islands, Stevenson describes a mountainous scene

looking in from the bay of Anaho. ‘In every crevice of that bar-

rier [of “shattered mountains”]’, he writes, ‘the forest harboured,

roosting and nesting there like birds about a ruin; and far above,

it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit’ (South

Seas, p. 7). Once more the author’s eye is drawn toward formal

oppositions, so that he notes the equivocal presence of forest, at

once softening and eroding the mountainous wall.

Not only the natural but also the human landscape of the South

Seas is composed of mutually opposing ideas. The chapters on

the Gilbert Islands, which were among the last to be written by

the author, comprise the point at which his reflections on mate-

rial culture reach their most decisive form. His description of the

diversity of housing on the island of Butaritari is characteristic,

since he writes of these dwellings:

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to

those of churches. Some might hold a battalion, some

were so minute they could scarce receive a pair of lovers;

only in the playroom, when the toys are mingled, do we

meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds;

some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled

and the walls pierced with little windows. A few were

perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest at random on a

green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand,

or along embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow

dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-

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141Ratnapalan

tree wood and palm-tree leaf were their materials; no nail

had been driven, no hammer sounded, in their building,

and they were held together by lashings of palm-tree sin-

net. (South Seas, p. 207)

The houses of Butaritari are joyfully irregular, of various

shapes, situated almost everywhere in the landscape, and

Stevenson notes all of the unique improvisations that contribute

to the diversity. Many of the houses contain a natural opening;

even those that are walled on all sides are ‘pierced with little win-

dows’: it is a feature that reflects the accessibility and potential

for adaptation of the people.12 Gilbertese creativity is further

emphasised by the fact that all of the buildings are made from

the same species of tree and are held together using materials

gathered from it.

On another Gilbert island, Apemama, King Tembinok’ builds

a settlement for Stevenson’s family called ‘Equator Town’.

Stevenson writes that after the lamps are lighted one night:

our dinner-table (lent, like all our furniture, by the king)

must be enclosed in a tent of netting, our citadel and

refuge; and this became all luminous, and bulged and

beaconed under the eaves, like the globe of some mon-

strous lamp under the margin of its shade. Our cabins, the

sides being propped up at a variety of inclinations, spelled

out strange, angular patterns of brightness. (South Seas,

p. 293)

The settlement at Equator Town is therefore entirely incongru-

ous. The tent, their protection against mosquitoes, ‘bulged and

beaconed’, the lamplight throwing irregular shapes into relief.

Stevenson notes all of the contortions with a painterly eye;

grounding experience in contradiction means that the percep-

tion of pure light and pure form must also be provisional.

Stevenson6.indb 141 23/10/2009 19:25


The German sociologist Max Scheler, writing years after

Stevenson with the same intuition, described the ‘contrariness’

of things as the basis of sensory experience, and to the finding of

this experience he gave the name philosophical anthropology.13

In a similar way, Stevenson tried to express an anthropology of

the South Seas that identified and worked with the contrariness

of things. Such notions were far removed from the academic

‘science of culture’ that had acquired the title of anthropol-

ogy through the collaborative efforts of evolutionary theory and

objective research.

During the nineteenth century, anthropology was character-

ized by an antagonism to theology, so that it became frozen

into two opposed views of humankind. On the one hand there

were theologians who, following orthodox Christianity, believed

that humans were beings uniquely created in the image of God,

and on the other hand there were evolutionists who, following

Darwin, believed that humans were essentially animals and

descended from the monkey. Whatever the respective bases for

these beliefs, the two views were regarded by nineteenth century

science as being antithetical. The evolutionary view restricted

human beings to the sphere of zoology and aimed to study them

as animals in their history as a race.14 The decisive moment in the

shift from ‘theological’ to ‘scientific’ anthropology in Britain was

the publication of Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture in

1871.15 In Tylor’s study the development theory of culture, rep-

resented as the inevitable material progress of all human socie-

ties from barbarism to civilization, was fused with the theory of

natural selection expounded by Darwin and others.

Stevenson knew of Tylor and the new anthropology: his cor-

respondence with Andrew Lang enabled him to appreciate the

intellectual setting in which Tylor worked, and he was also

familiar with George Turner’s Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and

Long Before (1884), a book whose preface had been written by

Tylor.16 However, he differed from Tylor in his approach in sig-

Stevenson6.indb 142 23/10/2009 19:25

143Ratnapalan

nificant respects. We have already mentioned his philosophical

anthropology; another, more specific way in which he differed

from contemporary scientific anthropology was in his critical

examination of assumptions of cultural phenomena as ‘survivals’

from an earlier epoch.

Stevenson critiques Tylor’s concept of survivals in his South

Seas writing through the form of ironic reversals and by the

discovery of paradoxes in contemporary Pacific Islands cultures,

which cannot simply be explained in Tylorian fashion as the

residue of a former condition of belief.17 There are examples of

this critique throughout the writing, such as in the inability of

Hawaiian judges to administer trusts, the view of King Tembinok

of the Gilberts as ‘the last erect vestige of a dead society’ (South

Seas, p. 275), and the Marquesan tendency towards suicide in

the wake of widespread depopulation. Far from being primitive

‘survivals’ or outmoded beliefs and customs, he claims that all

of these seemingly perplexing phenomena of modern culture are

actually direct outcomes of the destructive Western involvement

in the Pacific Islands.18

However, Stevenson was not concerned with simply formulat-

ing a systematic anthropology along the lines that had been devel-

oped earlier in the nineteenth century by Tylor and also by Lewis

Henry Morgan in the United States. Instead, as is evidenced by

his letters of 1888-9, he conceived of his research in the Pacific

Islands as a subject without borders – ‘out of the shadow of the

Roman empire’ (South Seas, p. 9), as he described his new-found

geographical and psychological situation. His anthropology was

to be experientially enriched through the human encounter, thus

free from the ideological restrictions that guided the researches

of evolutionary anthropologists. Since his plans were disrupted

by the criticism of his editor as well as by others, it is necessary

to search for the rudiments of this anthropology within a text,

In the South Seas, that is composed of fragments that are often

either altered or amended by others.

Stevenson6.indb 143 23/10/2009 19:25


Furthermore, in trying to locate Stevenson’s anthropology

of the Pacific, the scholarship of his contemporaries is only of

limited use. The kinds of questions that are normally reserved

for studies in scientific objectivity do not help to clarify his inten-

tions, because the distinction between object and subject that is

crucial to the former does not belong to the milieu of the encoun-

ter: the existential opening in which Stevenson’s observations

take place. It is rather, as Martin Heidegger wrote, an anthropol-

ogy in which others are encountered in the ‘surrounding world’,

since in this phenomenological space the ‘I’ does not distinguish

itself, and ‘the others’ describes ‘those among whom one is, too’.

Understood existentially, ‘the world is always already the one

that I share with the others’, and ‘being-in is being-with others.’19

An anthropology that is based on categorical reasoning does not

permit the thinking identified by Heidegger, and begins to under-

stand human existence only after prioritizing formal language as

the vehicle of expressive being. By contrast, as Stevenson notes

almost as soon as he sets foot in the Pacific, ‘The impediment of

tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated’ (South Seas,

p. 10). What he tries to relate in the subsequent account of his

first meeting with Marquesan people is the primacy of an alingual

world, a world without spoken language, in which other people

are sympathetically understood.20 In this situation, communica-

tion by means of gesture and the tone of voice is more important

than the language of speech and modified sound. After spending

his first day on the Islands, Stevenson sits in the evening writing

his journal in a cabin filled with Marquesan people watching him

‘in silence with embarrassing eyes.’ Confessing that he fell into

a kind of despair and even rage at the thought that ‘they were

beyond the reach of articulate communication’, he nevertheless

affirms that ‘all were to become our intimates’ (South Seas, pp.

9-10). Indeed, he proceeds to give an insight into the way that the

decline of their number has affected these people. He writes that

the Marquesan ‘lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality

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145Ratnapalan

too awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension

that he greets the reality with relief’. Of the shrivelling of their

cultural activity, he observes that ‘with the decay of pleasures,

life itself decays’ (South Seas, p. 25).

Stevenson’s anthropology of encounter, of meeting and

dialogue, follows a conception of the human person that is not

merely biological or physiological but also intertwined meaning-

fully with an existential commitment towards life. In the words

of Heidegger, ‘the “substance” of human being is not the spirit

as the synthesis of body and soul, but existence’ (Heidegger, p.

155). As with the work of thinkers such as Heidegger and Martin

Buber, Stevenson’s anthropology is not grounded in the figure of

the corporeal person, whether as an individual or as a member

of a group, but in the relationship between people and the world

that they inhabit, their surrounding world. To this extent, he

appreciated the value of the missionary R. H. Codrington’s dis-

covery that Melanesians perceived no basic difference between

man and beast, but recognised a defining antipathy distinguish-

ing man from ghost (South Seas, p. 28). Without once venturing

to comment on their scientific credibility, Stevenson remained

acutely sensitive to Pacific Islanders’ nocturnal fear of the dead,

which he relates through stories that were handed down genera-

tionally as well as communicated directly by people he had met

while on his travels.

Martin Buber stated that the essence of the person that is

special to them ‘can be directly known only through a living rela-

tion’, and that ‘the anthropologist can have nothing to do with a

division of consciousness’. The science of evolutionary anthro-

pology, which was still young but growing in authority during

Stevenson’s time, achieves what it does for thought precisely

through ‘objectification’, which in Buber’s judgement is identical

to ‘de-humanization’.21 The enquiry of philosophical anthropolo-

gy, on the other hand, begins with encounter at the level of ontol-

ogy, in which it is not possible to reify existence into objective

Stevenson6.indb 145 23/10/2009 19:25


categories such as race. Only by participating in what is felt to be

most essentially and intimately bound to the human encounter

can anthropological work be sheltered from its own powers of

distancing and clinical detachment. With this danger in mind,

in the opening pages of In the South Seas Stevenson writes that

‘the first South Sea island’, like the first love and the first sunrise,

‘touched a virginity of sense’ and cannot be repeated (South Seas,

p. 6). He thereby relates an anthropological perspective in which

the observer does not remain unaffected by his encounter with

the observed. Whether moved by a young Marquesan mother’s

‘tranquil despair’ at the rapid extinction of her people, or capti-

vated to recite Emerson at the sight of a steersman sailing alone

at night under the stars, Stevenson is always implicated as a

participant in these moments (South Seas, pp. 22, 110). He does

not separate himself from the questions that trouble the people

whom he encounters, but rather works through them within a

province of mutual feeling.

Anthropology, as with all science, is a human creation. No

divine observer is responsible for recording the facts, only the

person in a world of others, and because of this, anthropological

knowledge has a relative value. Stevenson held the information

provided by local inhabitants in higher regard than he did those

of foreign authorities on the islands, even if the latter were gener-

ally reliable. ‘I should prefer the statement of an intelligent native

[...] to the report of the most honest traveller’, he writes (South

Seas, p. 35). The diary form of anthropological record, linking

In the South Seas with Claude Levi-Straus’ Tristes Tropiques

and Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the

Term, provides a living record of the author’s commitment to his

research. By contrast, the ordered and systematic arrangement

of the scientific anthropological treatise abstracts and objectifies

information that was itself gathered from and made possible

through numerous encounters.

The apparently limited forms of travel extant in Stevenson’s

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147Ratnapalan

time also served to provide a better balance between the pre-

conceptual and the mathematical spaces through which the

world is humanly perceived.22 Rather than entering the islands

by aeroplane and through the filter of maps, Stevenson’s crossing

of the Pacific by boat and his subsequent travels on foot brought

him closer to the psychological landscape in which the islanders

themselves dwelt. In this way, the character of his anthropology

is determined by his mode of travel. The balance between lived

space, which is traditionally ascribed to the indigene, and the

objective space utilised by science, is here negotiated through

the human experience of journeying, which allows the traveller

to access a more immediate kind of sensing than is normally

acknowledged by the anthropological researcher. It is this found-

ing practice that enables Stevenson to express an anthropology

of encounter, uniting the aesthetics of being in the world and the

ethics of becoming attuned with life in the Pacific.

In his perception of contradictions in the appearance of phe-

nomena, in the analysis and rejection of the Tylorian concept

of survivals, and in the grounding of his understanding of the

human in the encounter between beings and their environment,

Stevenson gives support to a philosophical anthropology that has

today been largely forgotten or discarded, at least in the English-

speaking world. Far from being an approach tied to modern

scientific notions of life and the progress of culture, philosophi-

cal anthropology describes an orientation toward existence that

does not presume to know what the human being is, but studies

him both as the end of a long development and the beginning of

a new one.23

Stevenson6.indb 147 23/10/2009 19:25


Notes

1 The expression ‘hydrographical memoir’ is used in reference to Alexander Findlay’s self-description of his A Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean, Fifth Edn. (London: R. H. Lurie, 1884), which was Stevenson’s constant companion during his travels in the South Seas.

2 Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 5, henceforth cited in the text.

3 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1921), pp. 181-2.

4 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant, The Silverado Squatters and the Silverado Diary (Kessinger Publishing, 2005), p. 174.

5 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-), I, pp. 142-3.

6 Letters, IV, p. 221.

7 Letters, IV, p. 221 n.

8 James Hutchinson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1865).

9 See Norbert Waszek, The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society’ (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), p. 230.

10 Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the ‘Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences’, trans. by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1873]), p. 78.

11 The four antinomies, which Kant uses, are: (i) Is the world limited in space and time, or is it not? (ii) Is matter endlessly divisible or does it consist of atoms? (iii) Is there freedom or is everything determined by necessity? (iv) Is the world as a whole caused or uncaused? By taking up each of these questions from either side of the argument, Kant shows how it is possible within the terms set by the question to disprove the other. Hegel’s Logic, pp. 76-77.

12 According to John Hockings, the Gilbertese capacity for adaptation is many centuries old. See Hockings, Traditional Architecture in the Gilbert Islands: A Cultural Perspective (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1989). It is also notable how these and other

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149Ratnapalan

descriptions of the landscape of the South Seas presented by Stevenson, in their concentration on irregularity, disorder, and provisional appearance, resemble his memories of his childhood home, Edinburgh’s Old Town.

13 See Martin Buber, ‘The Philosophical Anthropology of Max Scheler’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 6, no. 2 (Dec., 1945), pp. 307-321 (p. 317).

14 See Erwin Straus, ‘The Upright Posture’, in Phenomenological Psychology (London: Tavistock, 1966), p. 139. See also Laavanyan Ratnapalan and David Reggio, ‘Erwin Straus and the Pathic’, (forthcoming).

15 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (2 vols., London: John Murray, 1871), I, pp. 99-100.

16 ‘Belle [Strong, Stevenson’s stepdaughter] is deep in work on Samoa: she reads Turner, and sniffs at his superficiality, and talks comparative mythology with extraordinary boldness.’ Stevenson, letter to his mother, [15?] August 1893, Letters, VIII, p. 149 and n. In a footnote to this letter, Booth and Mehew confirm that Stevenson was referring to George Turner. See Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago and Long Before; together with Notes on the Cults and Customs of Twenty-Three Other Islands in the Pacific (London: MacMillan and Co., 1884). Among many other correspondences and notes to Tylor in his published work, it was Lang who wrote the introductory essay to the collection entitled Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor: In Honour of his 75th Birthday, by H. Balfour et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), in which he claims that he had first met Tylor in 1872 (p. 1).

17 Stevenson’s critique of Tylor bears a resemblance to the contemporaneous studies of the German art historian Aby Warburg, who also made creative use of Tylorian survivals with his formulation of the nachleben, or ‘after-life’, of works of art. See George Didi-Huberman, ‘The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology’, Oxford Art Journal 25.1 (2002), pp. 59-70.

18 See Laavanyan Ratnapalan, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and Cultural Survivals in the South Seas’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 3 (2006), pp. 69-84.

19 Martin Heidegger, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. by Manfred Stassen (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 157.

Stevenson6.indb 149 23/10/2009 19:25


20 See Ilaria Sborgi, ‘“Home” in the South Seas’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 4 (2007), pp. 185-198, in which she explains how the notion of sympathy is ‘central to Stevenson’s theories of reading and writing’ (p. 194).

21 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Kegan Paul, 1947) pp. 122-5.

22 See the discussion of Erwin Straus in The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1963), pp. 318-328.

23 To paraphrase Erwin Straus in his essay, ‘The Upright Posture’, p. 140.

Stevenson6.indb 150 23/10/2009 19:25

151Tania Zulli

‘A phrase of Virgil speaks of English places’: Classical and European literature in R. L. Stevenson’s South Sea Tales

Tania Zulli

In 1889 the town of Apia, in Samoa, witnessed the arrival of R.

L. Stevenson. After a journey that had lasted more than a year,

he had finally reached the site he would soon decide to settle in.

Even if his first impression of the Samoan islands had not been

astonishing, he was fascinated by places he had dreamed of since

he was a child and whose descriptions he had read and listened to

throughout his life. These faraway tropical islands had nourished

his imagination when in Europe and America; and his curiosity

was now fulfilled. Stevenson’s enthusiasm included the people

and the culture of Polynesia. Every island was a new and unique

experience, a new world to be discovered, not only in geographi-

cal terms, but especially in its social and cultural expressions.

More than one reason convinced Stevenson to remain in Apia:

There was not only good communication with the

Western world but the climate had proved to be ideal as

far as Louis’s health was concerned. In a January letter

to Sydney Colvin Fanny revealed that in the six weeks

they had been in Apia RLS had experienced no cough, no

haemorrhaging, no fever and no night sweats. Not only

could he spend long hours writing without exhaustion,

but it was not unusual for him to spend entire days in the

saddle exploring the island in spite of occasional tropical

showers which drenched him to the skin.1

Favoured by his improving health and fascinated by new dis-

Stevenson6.indb 151 23/10/2009 19:25


coveries apt to nourish his narrative imagination, he decided to

accept S. S. McClure’s suggestion to look for inspiration in the

South Seas.2 Stevenson had declared he was going to Polynesia

to grow old and die, but when there his literary production was

prolific and his writings in the South Seas made a substantial

contribution to his already well-established fame. In the six years

spent in the Pacific he wrote many narrative and non narrative

works, whose topics were the islands and their population: The

Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) both together with

Lloyd Osbourne; two non-fiction pieces: In the South Seas (1896)

and A Footnote to History (1892); and a collection of short sto-

ries Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893): ‘The Beach of Falesá,’

‘The Bottle Imp,’ and ‘The Isle of Voices.’3 These works show a

deep concern for the places and peoples of the South Sea islands

and also an interesting approach on Stevenson’s part towards

them. His aim to depict the Pacific world as a lively and complex

reality, contemporary yet alien, is clearly expressed in In the

South Seas:

I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts

of the sea. […] No part of the world exerts the same attrac-

tive power upon the visitor [as the Pacific islands], and

the task before me is to communicate to fireside travelers

some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea

and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some

of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries,

and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or

Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.4

By spanning spatial and temporal dimensions, Stevenson

wished to present a kind of writing in which exotic elements and

European heredity could coexist. If for nothing else, he wanted

to provide ‘familiar’ stories to his reading public – which he still

regarded as European. As a result, he often compared Polynesian

Stevenson6.indb 152 23/10/2009 19:25

153Tania Zulli

culture with Scottish history and culture and, writing his South

Sea stories, always kept in mind his European literary back-

ground.5 Western life and literature were so far from Polynesian

folklore, but at the same time crucial in claiming the author’s

sense of belonging to the European milieu, that the natural

result was a series of multilayered narratives. As Julia Reid has

pointed out, an anthropological reading of In the South Seas

requires the difficult but necessary reconciliation of conflicting

interpretations about Stevenson’s treatment of Scottish and

Polynesian tradition. Such an interest in both worlds ‘was the

mark of a deeper intellectual preoccupation, a concern with the

evolution of cultures and religions, with the relations between

past and present, savagery and civilization.’6 Therefore, behind

Stevenson’s advocated link between European and Polynesian

literature lies an interest in a broader cultural and social

connection.

Stevenson’s note before the text of ‘The Bottle Imp’ is an

example testifying to how European and South Sea literatures

are linked in his thought:

Any student of that very unliterary product, the English

drama of the early part of the century, will here recognize

the name and the root idea of a piece once rendered popu-

lar by the redoubtable O. Smith. The root idea is there and

identical, and yet I hope I have made it a new thing. And

the fact that the tale has been designed and written for a

Polynesian audience may lend it some extraneous interest

nearer home. – R.L.S.7

Stevenson adapted the Victorian melodrama, a ‘very unliterary

product,’ to the literary interests of the Polynesians, and then

re-presented the work to readers ‘nearer home’ hoping that the

familiar plot might gain interest from a more unfamiliar, and

therefore appealing and seductive setting. The process of ‘trans-

Stevenson6.indb 153 23/10/2009 19:25


lation’ back and forth assumes a communion between Europe

and Polynesia to be looked for in history, traditions, and also in

literature; a shared interest in themes and ‘stories’ can be estab-

lished, in spite of a different degree of intellectual refinement.

In order to find a space for himself between the two cultures,

Stevenson started adapting Polynesian to European literary

genres and vice versa:

he started collecting and translating Polynesian myths

and folk-tales, and fashioned out of them ballads and long

poems for the ‘civilized’ readers at home. Then, revers-

ing the process, he went back to the ‘barbaric’ origins

of Western culture, and adapted Northern European

sagas and folk-tales to the Islanders’ ‘savage psychology’

(Letters, 7: 187): for ‘The Bottle Imp,’ he transposed to

Hawaii a German folk-tale; with the help of a British mis-

sionary, he started writing in Samoan ‘Eatuina,’ a tale set

at the times of the Saxons; and ‘The Waif Woman’ was

inspired by a collection of Nordic sagas. In all these cases,

he was positing a reading-model based on the ‘recapitula-

tion theory,’ according to which ‘primitive cultures’ cor-

respond to earlier stages of Western civilization (Tylor

1873).8

By locating the two cultures on different levels, Stevenson was

actually questioning the possibility of a straight correspondence

between them; common points and mutual reception were, after

all, not easy to achieve; they are more easily detectable for the

modern reader than they could have been for the late Victorian

public.9 However, an attentive reading shows how the author’s

exotic tales imply the merging of the two cultures in their plots,

character presentation, and literary references. Typically, a white

protagonist, more or less adapted to the life of the Pacific islands,

refers to his European background for consolation from a sense

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155Tania Zulli

of nostalgic longing, or as a way to cope with natives.10

The meeting of two cultures – the European and the

Polynesian – through a literary blending is ideally reproduced

in one of Stevenson’s most complex South Sea narratives, The

Ebb-Tide (1894). This relation has to be analyzed in connection

to the European fin de siècle cultural background of anxiety and

discontent, which the novella transposes into a new setting. The

initial quotation in The Ebb-Tide, taken from Shakespeare’s

Julius Caesar (‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’), despite its

use in its original context, hints at the alternation of fortune and

misery in the life of men or even, (remembering the title’s refer-

ence to ‘ebb’) to an inevitable end of fortune, or an instability in

the affairs of men.11 Transposed into a wider axiological setting,

it thus suggests the apprehension of the social and epistemic

instability felt by intellectuals in the late Victorian period. Torn

between the ideal representation of a world founded on progress

and wealth on the one hand, and the profound sense of distress

resulting from the loss of faith and the Darwinian fear for regres-

sion on the other, writers could not avoid transferring this state

of doubt to their work.

Matthew Arnold had given voice to this anxiety in his poem

‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartereuse’ years before:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.12

Economic growth and scientific innovations had not supplied

the expected inner tranquillity, and metropolitan areas lost their

characterization of places where happiness might be sought. In

this context, exotic narratives excited interest as ‘an imaginative

escape from the drabness of an overwhelmingly grey and ration-

alised world.’13 Such an escape, however, was not to be found in

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Stevenson’s novella. In The Ebb-Tide, he investigated the typi-

cally Victorian individual fears relocating them in the conflicting

and degraded individuality of white colonisers in the South Seas,

where immorality was more evident due to the situation of physi-

cal and existential precariousness. In such a context, Western

literature acquires special functions and values.

In this story, literary references work on a double level; there

is a personal level regarding the specific existence of individuals,

and a universal one in which these individuals come to embody

general truths. The link to European culture is presented in

the first part of the narration through the protagonists, whose

frequent references to disparate literary works – from Horace,

Virgil, and the Bible to Shakespeare, Burns, Defoe, Goldsmith,

music-hall songs, popular ballads – make the novella itself an

articulate collection of narrative genres and literary forms.

Living at the fringes of society, three white beachcombers, ‘the

three most miserable English-speaking creatures in Tahiti,’ find

themselves sitting on the beach under a purao-tree (South Sea

Tales, p. 124). Desperate, starving and hopeless, at the beginning

of the narration they seem to possess a single treasure: their liter-

ary reminiscences. They are, in one way or the other, supported

by their ‘artistic’ vein, be it under the form of Herrick’s educated

literary quotations, Huish’s music hall songs, or Davis’ whistled

popular ballads. Art, in its multifarious shapes, is occasionally a

way to cheerfulness, sometimes a moral support, more often an

instrument for provoking recollections of past life.14 It is, moreo-

ver, a way to meditation:

To and fro he paced like a caged brute; his mind whirling

through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes,

as he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crum-

bling whitewash was all full of them: Tahitian names, and

French, and English, and rude sketches of ships under sail

and men at fisticuffs.

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157Tania Zulli

It came to him of a sudden that he too must leave upon

these walls the memorial of his passage. He paused before

a clean space, took the pencil out, and pondered. (South

Sea Tales, p. 142)

Apart from serving as a marker of class difference, the works

quoted by the three beachcombers stand for a peculiar personal

condition which then becomes representative of broad consid-

erations on man’s existence.15 The essential bond of the artistic

element with memories and past life works on an intradiegetic

level – specifically that of Herrick’s youth – and on an extradi-

egetic one, pointing at Stevenson’s longing for his Scottish cul-

tural roots.

One of the main characters of The Ebb-Tide, Robert Herrick,

shows a particular affection towards the ‘tattered Virgil in his

pocket’ (South Sea Tales, p. 124); he reads his favourite passages,

studies the new ones, and lingers on memories of his schooldays

brought about by the Aeneid:

the busy schoolroom, the green playing–fields, holidays at

home, and the perennial roar of London, and the fireside,

and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of

those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom

we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at

school, to pass into the blood and become native in the

memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much

of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the

student’s own irrevocable youth. (South Sea Tales, p. 125,

my emphasis)

The gift of literature is that of ‘passing into the blood and

becoming native in the memory;’ classical and European culture

belong therefore to a sole heredity that refers to Herrick’s past

youth, whose melancholic memories at least bring consola-

Stevenson6.indb 157 23/10/2009 19:25


tion to his destitute state (‘Virgil [...] had often consoled him

in his hunger’: South Sea Tales, p. 124). According to Richard

Ambrosini, Herrick, by reading Virgil, tries to project his own

existential failure on a universal dimension, since he is not able

to tackle his sad destiny.16 And yet, he is also aware that Virgil

does not provide a practical way out of his miserable life. The role

of literature is all interior; the quotations by Virgil, Heine, and

Beethoven are centred on Herrick’s individuality and are seen in

relation to his personal life. Literature has ‘passed into Herrick’s

blood,’ and has become an intrinsic part of him, it therefore

works on general existential problems seen from an individual

perspective. Herrick’s oscillation between a state of desperation

and the will to react to it with the help of poetry,17 resembles

Stevenson’s personal discomfort in the years after writing The

Ebb-Tide, years of artistic de-motivation countered by the will

to escape his depression through writing.18 Moreover, Herrick’s

getting consolation from literature equals Stevenson’s early opti-

mism towards the curative power of art: ‘When I suffer in mind,

stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and I consider one

who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind’ (Letters, III, 61).

Several critics have underlined the unrealistic nature of

Herrick’s quotation of such an extensive set of literary texts;19

more than a destitute beachcomber ended up on a tropical island

in search of fortune he resembles ‘a Marabar cave of literary ech-

oes’ or an eminent scholar from his Oxford college (Sandison, p.

327). If on the one hand, Stevenson sacrifices the realistic vein in

the story, on the other hand Herrick’s condition is the epitome of

a broader, general state: in presenting Herrick as a cultured man,

Stevenson is anticipating a literary season that would combine

the figure of the adventurer with the man-of-letters as typified

by Joseph Conrad (Ambrosini, pp. 391, 262). Robert Herrick

is not a miserable voyager washed up in the South Seas; he is

a sort of ‘everyman’ whose existential problems go beyond the

geographical boundaries of the Pacific island, or those of Europe,

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159Tania Zulli

and become the symbol of the general disruption and instabil-

ity felt in the last years of the nineteenth century. In addition,

he is the intellectual trying to fill an existential gap that exists

independent of exact location in space and time. The inability of

the three beachcombers to accomplish any literary act adds to

their personal and existential failure, but the uselessness of their

‘shallow creative endeavours’ is counterbalanced by the symbolic

value of their literary memories.20

Quotations in The Ebb-Tide trace Herrick’s moral route, driv-

ing him towards death and despair; art does not seem to help

the intellectual who is sinking into the existential sickness of

life. Herrick goes through different phases of artistic composi-

tion: first he repeats to himself passages he remembers from his

schooldays and that have accompanied him throughout his life,

then he writes a letter to his girlfriend, and finally he decides to

‘carve’ memorable sentences on the walls of the old calaboose.

Before accomplishing this final act, in the excitement of artistic

composition, he foresees change: ‘From his jarred nerves, there

came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or

ill he could not say: change, he knew no more – change, with

inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless’ (South Sea Tales,

p. 144, my emphasis). The change alluded to – also introduced

by Beethoven’s quotation ‘Destiny knocking at the door’ –

anticipates the adventures about to start, but is also, inevitably,

a general prediction of a changing future viewed with both trepi-

dation and curiosity. From a narrative point of view, Herrick’s

culture does not convey, in concrete terms, either his salvation

or his elevation to a privileged level; his knowledge provides

some support (‘consolation’), but gives no definite solution to his

state. The value of literature is to be found elsewhere; first, in

its linking Europe to the South Seas, secondly in its building a

bridge between past and present through memory, and thirdly

in association with an anticipated new life: the adventure on the

Farallone and, from a more general perspective, the uncertain

Stevenson6.indb 159 23/10/2009 19:25


future of mankind.

In terms of the author’s artistic development, change has to be

understood as a step ahead for the traditional adventure novel;

The Ebb-Tide, in fact, not only distances itself from the genre of

romance, but anticipates a new departure in Stevenson’s writing

made towards psychological introspection, with a direct corre-

spondence in the analysis of human destiny. In the last decades

of the nineteenth century, Stevenson’s fiction was going through

a shift from traditional Victorian writing – that of the adventure

novel – to a more complex and demanding kind of narrative.

Commenting on The Wrecker (1892), he had declared that it

was ‘in quite a new vein for me’ (Letters, VI, 375-6). A chang-

ing perspective in his South Sea writing has been pointed out by

various critics; Roslyn Jolly defines ‘The Beach of Falesá’ ‘a study

of manners in a mixed society’ and focuses on how Stevenson

abandons the adventure genre in favour of a kind of domestic

fiction set in exotic places, introducing groundbreaking issues

such as miscegenation.21 Jolly concludes that: ‘although the

age of innocent imperial adventure ended for Stevenson when

he began to encounter the realities of empire, during and after

the writing of ‘The Beach of Falesá’ he expresses no regret for

this, but looks forward enthusiastically to what was, for him, the

combination of new subject matter with a new fictional mode’

(Jolly, p. 477). According to Julia Reid, The Ebb-Tide marks the

end of the ‘curative value of romance’ (Reid, p. 52) in Stevenson’s

fiction, while Roger Ebbatson argues that ‘The Ebb-Tide may be

read as a symptomatic text of the fin de siècle from historical,

literary, and theological perspectives.’22

The presence of literary references in The Ebb-Tide points to

two crucial themes which testify to the research of a different

kind of writing, associated with Stevenson’s growing artistic

maturity. Both memory, which we have seen associated with

Herrick’s literary allusions, and the past are connected to the

relationship between European and Polynesian culture. It is

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161Tania Zulli

memory, the melancholic reappearance of the past, to re-activate

one’s own historical, cultural, and personal identity. Herrick’s

attitude towards literature has affinities with Stevenson’s long-

ing for his roots when confined in the South Seas. The revival

of identity-affirming memories would be central in his last

unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston (1894), in which

the value of Scottish origins proves vital to Archie Weir when

in Hermiston.23 With regard to this, Francesco Marroni argues

that Weir attempts to ‘explore the theme of memory on a more

complex level, not only as a nostalgic return to his historical and

cultural roots, but also as a powerful fusion of the many histori-

cal and legendary voices that made up the heart and essence of

Scotland.’24

Significantly, the themes of exile, past roots, memories and

artistic composition are introduced in the novel right from the

author’s dedication:

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn

On Lammermiur. Hearkening I heard again

In my precipitous city beaten bells

Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar,

Intent on my own race and place, I wrote.25

Writing can control and give voice to man’s inner conflicts

and moral frailties. Stevenson was perfectly aware that ‘the

fears and vulnerabilities of the South Sea islanders were little

different from those of men and women everywhere;’ he knew

that his interest in man’s mind and morality (an interest he had

transposed in his narratives since Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) now

exceeded geographical – and temporal – boundaries.26 European

and Polynesian cultures were both embedded in his (later) lit-

erary identity and they played a crucial role in giving a form to

the existential dilemmas characterizing the Victorian and late

Victorian epistemic mood.

Stevenson6.indb 161 23/10/2009 19:25


Stevenson’s wonderful declaration: ‘I refuse the offering of life

without my art. I am not but in my art; it is me; I am the body

of it merely’ must have meant more than a simple, if absolute,

fusion of body and literature (Letters, IV, 252-3). In these words

one can read the hint at art – and literature – as a vital element

for the development of one’s own inner life. However, the former

optimistic and light-hearted vision of literature as a cure to

human pain was lost in Stevenson’s later writing in the name of a

prose dealing with unresolved historical and individual conflicts

in which the fear for man’s destiny became central, together with

the awareness that literature was the means to explore it.

Notes

1 Lowell D. Holmes, Treasure Islands, Cruising the South Seas with Robert Louis Stevenson, (New York: Sheridan House, 2001), p. 184.

2 See Robert I. Hillier, ‘In the South Seas’, Studies in Scottish Fiction 23 (1988), p. 105.

3 Stevenson died in 1894 and had settled at Vailima in 1890, but before arriving there he had travelled for two years in Hawaii, Australia, Marquesas, and Marshall Islands, leaving from San Francisco on 28th June 1888.

4 Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, ed. by Neil Rennie, (Harmondsworth and London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 5-6, henceforth cited in the text.

5 ‘When I desired any detail of savage custom, or superstitious belief, I cast back in the stories of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some equal trait of barbarism […] what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or of the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas of Tahiti’ (R. L. Stevenson, In the South Seas, p. 13).

6 Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the ‘Fin de Siècle’, (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 108.

7 R. L. Stevenson, South Sea Tales, p. 72. About the inspiration for this short story, Roslyn Jolly writes that ‘the source for Stevenson’s story was ‘The Bottle Imp’, a melodrama by Richard Brinsley Peake (1792-1847), first performed at Covent Garden in 1828 featuring the

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163Tania Zulli

actor Richard John ‘Obi’ Smith (1786-1855), commonly known as ‘O. Smith’; Smith’s performance in this piece sealed his reputation as a player of demons, monsters, and other villainous roles. Peake’s play was itself based on a German folktale, and although Stevenson seems not to have encountered the prose source directly he acknowledged the story’s generic origins when he spoke of ‘The Bottle Imp’ as ‘the centre-piece of a volume of Märchen’ he planned to write’ (Roslyn Jolly, Introduction to South Sea Tales, p. 270).

8 Richard Ambrosini, ‘The Four Boundary-Crossings of R. L. Stevenson, Novelist and Anthropologist’, R. L. Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, ed. by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 33.

9 See Roslyn Jolly, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoan History: Crossing the Roman Wall’, Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific, ed. by Bruce Bennett, Jeff Doyle, Satendra Nandan, (London: Skoob Books, 1996), pp. 113-114.

10 This is the case of the ‘scattered men of many European races’ alluded to in The Ebb-Tide (South Sea Tales, p. 123), among which are the three protagonists of the story; also of Wiltshire and Case in ‘The Beach of Falesá.’ Stevenson may have transferred onto his characters a veiled personal longing for Europe which he usually tried to hide by repeatedly saying Samoa was a place he preferred to the continent.

11 In Shakespeare’s text, the words of Brutus are also an incitement to ‘seize the day.’ Alternation of fear and renewed hope can be found in many Victorian and Late Victorian authors (Matthew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’, for example).

12 Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, Matthew Arnold, (London: Everyman, 1998), p. 80.

13 Simon Dentith, Society and Cultural Forms in Nineteenth-Century England, (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 171.

14 Art also stimulates action: only after quoting, reading, and writing (that is, after performing literary efforts) the characters start ‘acting’ – the first three chapters of the novel are in fact characterised by inactivity, the protagonists are totally inert.

15 Each character quotes according to his class provenance and culture. Herrick, the most cultured of the trio, quotes from Beethoven, Virgil, Horace, Heinrich Heine, von Matthisson; Davis whistles popular ballads (‘The Irish Washerwoman,’ ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ ‘The Beautiful

Stevenson6.indb 163 23/10/2009 19:25


Land,’ ‘Dandy Jim of Carolina’); and Huish experiments with music hall songs such as those by G. W. Hunt (1868).

16 See Richard Ambrosini, R. L. Stevenson. La poetica del romanzo, (Roma: Bulzoni, 2001), p. 384.

17 ‘Had he no rights? – only the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the unbearable? Ich trage unertragliches, the quotation rose in his mind; he repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewolt. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn’ (South Sea Tales, p. 144).

18 A number of Stevenson’s letters of this period testify to this. See, for example, the letter written to Sidney Colvin on 6th October 1894 in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), VIII, 603-604, henceforth cited in the text.

19 Alan Sandison, ‘The Ebb-Tide, A Modernist in the South Seas’, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism, (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 317-367; Alistair Fowler, ‘Parables of Adventure: the Debatable Novels of R. L. Stevenson’, Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction: Critical Essays, ed. by Ian Campbell, (Manchester: Carcanet, 1979), pp. 105-29; Richard Le Gallienne (see Ambrosini, p. 389).

20 Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 160.

21 Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s ‘Sterling Domestic Fiction’: ‘The Beach of Falesá’’, Review of English Studies n.s. 50 (1999), pp. 471.

22 Roger Ebbatson, ‘The Ebb-Tide: Missionary Endeavour in the Islands of Light’, Figures of Heresy, ed. by Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor, (Brighton, East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), p. 91.

23 However, in Weir of Hermiston, the cultural evocations attain a new fusion rather than remaining, as in Herrick’s case, a heap of fragments.

24 Francesco Marroni, ‘Memory and Mortality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston’, RSV 20 (July 2005), p. 150.

25 R. L. Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, ed. by Catherine Kerrigan, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 4. Italics in the

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165Tania Zulli

text.

26 Jenny Calder, Introduction to Island Landfalls: Reflections from the South Seas, (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1982), p. xiii.

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167Nancy Bunge

The Calvinistic romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Nancy Bunge

Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledges that Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s work has influenced him in a variety of ways.1 He

includes Hawthorne in the list of authors whose writing style he

mimicked in an attempt to complicate and improve his own.2

Twice, Stevenson attributes to Hawthorne the observation

that nature sometimes demonstrates its power by taking over

places: in a letter of 1869 and again in an essay of 1875, when he

writes ‘even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as

Hawthorne liked to put it, “taken back to Nature” by any decent

covering of vegetation.’3 But Stevenson most provocatively con-

fesses Hawthorne’s influence when he discusses what he calls the

‘epical value’ of romance in his essay ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances.’

This essay suggests that Stevenson sees ‘the artistic result of

a romance’ as a synonym of ‘the epical value’: it is a trace ‘left

upon the memory’ like that left by contemplating a painting. This

‘impression [. . .] left with us’ is an essential element of romance

(something which ‘it is the function of that form of art to create’)

or a ‘really powerful and artistic novel.’4

Stevenson argues that literature with ‘epical value’ has richness

theories and words cannot capture. Moreover, he believes such

work often inspires others to produce new analyses of the world:

Those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those

irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of

the world that we have not yet realized, ever another and

another corner; and after the facts have been thus vividly

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brought before us and have had time to settle and arrange

themselves in our minds, some day there will be found

the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.

(‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, p. 34.)

But, Stevenson goes on to assert that the interpretations this

literature inspires can never adequately capture what the work

suggests because ‘what is left upon the memory by any really

powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and

refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet some-

thing as simple as nature’ (‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’ p. 36).

Stevenson’s analysis here coordinates well with Hawthorne’s

claim in the ‘Author’s Preface’ to The House of the Seven Gables,

that the romance ‘sins unpardonably, so far as it may survive

aside from the truth of the human heart.’5 And like Stevenson,

Hawthorne argues that the romance conveys its message

indirectly:

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any

effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile

process than the ostensible one. The Author has consid-

ered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to

impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod – or

rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly – thus

depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly

and unnatural attitude. (Seven Gables, p. 2.)

Stevenson maintains that ‘at the present moment we can

recall one man only, for whose works it would have been equally

possible to accomplish our present design: and that man is

Hawthorne’ (‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, pp. 37-8). And so, as

Honor Mulholland notes, Stevenson declares Hawthorne ‘the

major romance writer of the age.’6 Even beyond that, Stevenson

suggests that the ‘supreme artistic intention,’ ‘the unity, and

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169Nancy Bunge

unwavering creative purpose’ embedded in Hawthorne’s fiction

‘impresses itself on the most indifferent reader,’ and presumably

even more so, on an appreciative and attentive reader like Robert

Louis Stevenson (‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, pp. 37-8).

Although Stevenson acknowledges the influence of

Hawthorne’s artistic achievement, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

suggests that Stevenson also recognized in Hawthorne’s work

awareness of the lethal arrogance that Calvinism’s insistence on

purity could nourish. James Hogg in The Private Memoirs and

Confessions of an Justified Sinner also portrayed this psychologi-

cal phenomenon in 1824, before either Stevenson or Hawthorne

published anything and, according to Eric Massie, Stevenson

read Hogg in 1881, before composing Dr. Jekyll and My Hyde.7

But Stevenson categorizes Hogg with ‘quaint, unwholesome

authors,’ while in Hawthorne, he apparently found a model for

making the romance a vehicle for the concern with human evil

that Stevenson, Hawthorne and their cultures shared.8

For the ‘epical truth’ at the centre of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

is the double nature of human beings. Sigmund Freud’s notions

about the perpetual conflict between consciousness and the

unconscious make it enticing to try to explain the psychological

dynamics of Stevenson’s story with them. Richard Dury summa-

rizes what this approach yields:

In a psychological approach that is also clearly encour-

aged, Jekyll symbolises a part of the human personality,

what Freud (and his translators) would later call the ego

(the conscious part of the mind), with Utterson and his

paternal attributes as the superego (the part of the mind

that regulates conduct according to society’s norms), and

with Hyde as the id (the instinctive and selfish mental

force that seeks satisfaction of desires, suppressed or ‘hid-

den’ by civilization).9

Stevenson6.indb 169 23/10/2009 19:25


But this analysis does not successfully explain the model of

personality suggested by the work; for instance, while in Freud’s

theories, the ego knows nothing of the id, Jekyll has complete

awareness of Hyde. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction offers a much

more convincing account of the notions central to Stevenson’s

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Stevenson acknowledges that Hawthorne shares his inter-

est in people’s determination to disown inconvenient aspects

of themselves, a characteristic central to Jekyll’s problems. In

Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes, Stevenson spins a tale of two

Edinburgh sisters who squander their lives in mutual hatred,

guessing that Hawthorne could write a telling account of their

enduring anger: ‘Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned

into a cabinet picture.’10 Stevenson imagines how Hawthorne

would have presented them to us, guessing that the tale would

conclude with their reconciliation: ‘One fine day, at a word, a

look, a visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would melt

and the chalk boundary be overstepped for ever’ (Picturesque

Notes, p. 404).

Stevenson’s assigning this story to Hawthorne makes complete

sense given characters like Dimmesdale and Chillingsworth in

The Scarlet Letter whose conflict ultimately resolves into a shared

purpose when Dimmesdale admits that without Chillingsworth’s

persistent reminders, he never would have made his saving

confession. But those Hawthorne tales, like ‘Young Goodman

Brown,’ that set out the general principles of human nature that

manifest themselves as a result of hypocrisy provide even fuller

insight into Hawthorne’s and Stevenson’s common perspective.

‘Young Goodman Brown’ offers a stark parable of what hap-

pens when human beings refuse to own their flaws. The Puritan

Brown considers himself completely good, but when he goes

into the woods to fulfil an ‘evil purpose,’ he encounters a man

resembling him whose devilish nature becomes apparent when

his walking stick transforms itself into a snake. As Brown’s

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171Nancy Bunge

depraved double urges him towards the witches’ meeting, Brown

resists, arguing that in doing so he would betray his ancestors,

his community and his wife. Eventually Brown gives into ‘the

instinct that guides mortal man to evil,’ rushing through the for-

est towards the witches’ Sabbath.11

The ceremony itself celebrates human unity through owner-

ship of sin. Not only does the whole community attend, they

enjoy a fellowship inaccessible to them in conventional society:

Irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and

pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste

dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives

and woman of spotted fame, wretches given over to all

mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.

It was strange to see, that the good shrank not from

the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

Scattered, also, among their pale-faced enemies, were the

Indian Priests. (‘Young Goodman Brown’, p. 88.)

The figure conducting the service urges his parishioners to

accept that corruption binds them together: “‘Evil is the nature

of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again,

my children, to the communion of your race!’” (‘Young Goodman

Brown’, p. 89).

At the last moment, Brown refuses to participate and urges

his wife to do the same. Rather than redeeming his life, this act

of ‘goodness,’ isolates him from everyone, including his spouse,

Faith. Because he believes himself pure, Brown cannot stand to

associate with the impure. Thus, Brown’s so-called piety ruins his

life, making him ‘a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful,

if not a desperate man’ (‘Young Goodman Brown’, p. 89). This

double bind situation and lack of final consolatory solution is

reminiscent of Jekyll’s predicament for, like Brown, Jekyll suf-

fers whatever he does.

Stevenson6.indb 171 23/10/2009 19:25


Hawthorne’s tale ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ suggests

that the lessons of ‘Young Goodman Brown’ apply to virtually

everyone, for most people, like Brown, hide their flaws behind a

thin veneer of civility that easily wears off, exposing the ugly real-

ity beneath. The central character, Robin Molineux, sees people

who had earlier asserted their propriety joyfully giving them-

selves over to gratuitous malice. He witnesses an episode in the

American revolution, where people who would later characterize

their actions as idealistic acts of protest behave like ‘fiends that

throng in mockery round some dead potentate, mighty no more,

but majestic still in his agony. On they went, in counterfeited

pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all

on an old man’s heart.’12 Robin thus learns ‘one man [may] have

several voices’ (‘Major Molineux’, p. 226).

Freud linked the less desirable aspects of human nature to

sexuality and aggression. While Stevenson and Hawthorne also

acknowledge the power and attraction of both sex and violence,

both suggest that human corruption has much a much more

innocuous and obvious source. Their stories argue that the

simple and common refusal to acknowledge one’s flaws can

destroy one’s life. Stevenson makes the point that this is the

central message of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a letter to John

Paul Bocock: ‘The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite

– not because he was fond of women [. . .] Bad and good, even

to our human eyes, has no more connection with what is called

dissipation than it has with flying kites. But the sexual field and

the business field are perhaps the two best places for the display

of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness. That is what people see;

and these they confound.’13

Hawthorne makes the connection between evil and an arro-

gant refusal to own one’s defects explicit in ‘Fancy’s Show Box’

where Mr Smith looks back on his life and recalls instances when

cruel thoughts passed through his mind, but he resisted acting

on them. Still, the tale’s narrator refuses to declare Mr. Smith

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173Nancy Bunge

innocent, instead insisting that Smith’s attempt to reassure

himself by noting that he didn’t realize these fancies in fact con-

demns him: ‘There is reason to believe, that one truly penitential

tear would have washed away each hateful picture, and left the

canvass white as snow. But Mr Smith, at a prick of a Conscience

too keen to be endured, bellowed aloud, with impatient agony

[. . .] His heart still seemed to fester with the venom of the dag-

ger.’14 The narrator concludes the tale by warning everyone of the

importance of owning and repenting the slightest failings:

Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the

guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has

surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity.

He must feel, that, when he shall knock at the gate of

Heaven, no semblance of an unspotted life can entitle him

to entrance there. Penitence must kneel, and Mercy come

from the footstool of the throne, or that golden gate will

never open! (‘Fancy’s Showbox’, p. 226.)

Similarly, Stevenson does not attribute Dr. Jekyll’s decision to

disown part of himself to any large sin. Jekyll simply strives to

appear more impressive than he truly is; in his final confession,

he reports: ‘The worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety

of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such

as found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry

my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave counte-

nance before the public’ (Jekyll and Hyde, p. 58). When he grows

older and reflects on his life, Jekyll realizes that

I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life [.

. .] It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations

than any particular degradation in my faults, that made

me what I was and, with even a deeper trench than in the

majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good

Stevenson6.indb 173 23/10/2009 19:25


and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.

(Jekyll and Hyde, p. 58)

And in separating off his flawed side, Jekyll allows it to grow

monstrous. Indeed the more Jekyll works to eliminate Hyde

from his life by behaving impeccably, the more Hyde’s power

and evil grow.

Hawthorne not only writes parables about the importance of

owning faults, he examines this issue in a variety of particular

contexts some of which find echoes, however briefly, in Dr Jekyll

and Mr Hyde. For instance, Hawthorne wrote a number of tales

about scientists, ‘The Birth-mark,’ ‘Dr Heidegger’s Experiment,’

and ‘Rappacini’s Daughter,’ all warning against the arrogance

that scientific achievement encourages. Aylmer in ‘The Birth-

mark’ believes that he can perfect human life, even though the

notebooks recording the results of his experiments testify to the

limits he refuses to recognize in himself: ‘It was the sad confes-

sion, and continual exemplification, of the short-comings of the

composite man – the spirit burdened with clay and working in

matter – and of the despair that assails the higher nature, at find-

ing itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part.’15

Dr Jekyll is a scientist who, like Aylmer, thinks he can create

and use potions to eliminate imperfection from human life,

although Jekyll hopes to separate where Aylmer hopes to sup-

press the evil part:

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive dual-

ity of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended

in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly

be said to be either, it was only because I was radically

both; and from an early date, even before the course of

my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most

naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell

with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of

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175Nancy Bunge

the separation of these elements. (Jekyll and Hyde, p. 59.)

Jekyll succeeds no better than Aylmer: Jekyll’s notebook,

discovered by Lanyon, like Aylmer’s, records a series of failures.

In ‘The Birth-mark,’ Aylmer aspires to free his wife, Georgiana,

from the birthmark he believes contaminates her with frailty.

Surely, as Aylmer experiments with the solution he will give to

Georgiana, he has some understanding of the danger it presents

to his wife. Indeed, she discovers when she steps into his lab that

despite the bravado and confidence that pervade his interactions

with her during the experiment, he frantically struggles to con-

trol it: ‘He was as pale as death, anxious, and absorbed, and hung

over the furnace as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness

whether the liquid, which it was distilling, should be the draught

of immortal happiness or misery. How different from the san-

guine and joyous mien that he had assumed for Georgiana’s

encouragement!’ (‘The Birth-mark’, pp. 50-1). Fear fighting with

desire similarly infects Jekyll as he prepares a transforming

potion:

I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so

potently controlled and shook the very fortress of iden-

tity, might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the

least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly

blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it

to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular

and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm.

(Jekyll and Hyde, p. 60.)

Because neither Jekyll nor Aylmer can resist the lure of

attempting to achieve a perfection incompatible with their

humanity, Jekyll destroys himself and Aylmer kills his wife. To

further underline the parallels between the two works, some

specifics from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde recall details from ‘The

Stevenson6.indb 175 23/10/2009 19:25


Birth-mark.’ For instance, Aylmer’s assistant, Aminadab, like

Hyde, is short and hairy. Also the hand motif associated with the

animalistic Hyde is reminiscent of the hand-shaped birthmark

representing human imperfection in Hawthorne’s tale.

Parallels also exist between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the

circumstances that surround Hawthorne’s other wayward

scientists. For instance, in ‘Rappacini’s Daughter,’ Rappacini,

like Jekyll is a renowned doctor who has a garden reminiscent

of Jekyll’s courtyard. Also, Rappacini’s garden, like Jekyll’s

cabinet, is a mysterious place with a private entrance. Baglioni

in ‘Rappacini’s Daughter,’ resembles Lanyon in that he declares

Rappacini’s experiments as beyond the boundaries of the medi-

cal profession. Giovanni, after being infected, like Jekyll, looks

at his reflection with, first, satisfaction and, then, horror and like

Jekyll rejects what he first desired. ‘The Birth-mark,’ ‘Rappacini’s

Daughter,’ and ‘Dr Heidegger’s Experiment,’ all have scientists

with laboratories in their homes, transforming potions and

mirrors.

Hawthorne also ties the search for perfection to religion, sug-

gesting that the religious, like scientists, may also be inclined

to deny their faults, and, as a result, discover themselves

overwhelmed by them. In ‘The Gentle Boy,’ for instance, the

righteousness of both the Puritans and the Quakers destroys

themselves and those sharing their lives. In ‘Young Goodman

Brown,’ Brown catches a shocking glimpse of the reality that even

the pious have shortcomings when Goody Cloyse, the woman

who taught him his catechism, searches for her witch’s broom.

Similarly in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Utterson discovers ‘a copy

of a pious work’ in Jekyll’s library ‘for which Jekyll had several

times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with

startling blasphemies’ (Jekyll and Hyde, p. 49).

When Hyde commits his most egregious act, he batters Sir

Danvers Carew to death with a cane. Similarly, in ‘My Kinsman,

Major Molineux,’ if the young Robin were to give way to his

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177Nancy Bunge

impulses, he would let loose with his staff. First he is tempted

to hit a ‘distinguished gentleman,’ then a ‘courteous innkeeper’

and finally, all the ‘grinning rascals’ he meets in the city (‘Major

Molineux’, pp. 211-15). When Robin wants to beat people with

this cudgel, when Aylmer kills his wife, when Dr. Rappacini

infects his daughter, when the bickering Quakers and Puritans

destroy the gentle boy, they all manifest the consequences of

arrogance. In Hawthorne’s fiction, only those who own and con-

fess their faults like Roderick in ‘Egotism or the Bosom Serpent’

or Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter can find serenity. Although

Jekyll never finds peace, he does write a kind of confession, fear-

ing that Hyde will tear it up.

Although, on the surface, some similarity exists between the

eternal human alienation described by Freud and that presented

by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there are

differences. Perhaps the most significant is that Freud traces evil

to an unconscious seething with such malignant impulses that

we choose to deny them; Freud considers his view of human

nature so horrifying that he expects others to begin ‘arguing that

after all it is unlikely that such a large space should be given to

evil in the constitution of human beings.’ Freud challenges them

to face the truth:

Consider the Great War which is still laying Europe waste.

Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies

which are able to spread over the civilized world. Do you

really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding

men without conscience could have succeeded in unleash-

ing all these evil spirits if millions of followers did not

share their guilt?16

On the other hand, Stevenson and Hawthorne suggest that

the slide towards evil has apparently innocuous beginnings: one

need only give in to the universal human impulse to avoid fac-

Stevenson6.indb 177 23/10/2009 19:25


ing one’s imperfections, which the intolerance of misbehaviour

common to Calvinistic cultures can reinforce. Evil starts with a

smallest act of arrogance. As one’s view of oneself becomes more

inflated and the gap grows between one’s self image and reality,

the need to destroy anything that recalls reality can become large

enough to inspire violence. Hence, one day, the mere sight of a

person who has retained their innocence or goodness can cause

murderous rage, as it does in Mr Hyde.

When one compares Freud’s dramatic explanation of evil with

the familiar psychological patterns Hawthorne and Stevenson set

out, it validates Stevenson’s judgment that artists, not theorists,

best capture human realities by rendering ‘something so com-

plicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and

yet something as simple as nature’ (‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’,

p. 36).

Notes

1 My sincere thanks go to Richard Dury for his generous help with this article. I could not have written it without his aid. He helped me locate the references to Hawthorne in Stevenson’s work and then, after I drafted it, he kindly read it and offered many helpful additions. Thanks also to Laurence Davies for his good suggestions.

2 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A College Magazine,’ The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, 26 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1921-3), 12, 49-50:

‘Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality [. . .] I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.’

3 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places,’ Works, 24, 334-5. Stevenson may be relying on his memory for this quotation, for although Hawthorne describes nature reclaiming locations a few times, I cannot find this particular phrasing in

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179Nancy Bunge

Hawthorne’s work. It definitely does not come from any of Hawthorne’s novels since it does not appear in A Concordance to the Five Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne edited by John E. Byers, Jr. and James J. Owen (New York: Garland, 1979). Stevenson also alludes to Hawthorne’s idea in a letter: ‘The whole place looks dreary and wretched; for here, nature, as Hawthorne would have said, has not sufficient power to take back to herself what the idleness and absence of man has let go’ – Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), I, 186.

4 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances,’ Works, 4, 36-7.

5 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, The Centenary Edition, 23 vols (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1962), 2, 1.

6 Honor Mulholland, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Forms’ in Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Andrew Noble (London: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1983), p. 96.

7 Eric Massie, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner,’ Studies in Hogg and His World (1999), vol. 10, p. 74.

8 Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to George Saintsbury on 17 May 1891, Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, VII, 126. Quoted by Eric Massie.

9 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. by Richard Dury (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. xxcii-xxix.

10 Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes, Works, Vailima Edition, 1, p. 404. A cabinet picture is ‘a small and generally highly finished picture, suitable for a small room and for close inspection’ (http://dict.die.net/cabinet%20picture/).

11 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ The Centenary Edition, 10, 83.

12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’ The Centenary Edition, 11, 230.

13 Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters, 6, 56-7.

14 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Fancy’s Show Box,’ The Centenary Edition, 9, 225.

15 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Birth-mark,’ The Centenary Edition, 10, 49.

16 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 179-180.

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Stevenson6.indb 180 23/10/2009 19:25

181Andrew De Young

The case of the missing detective: detection, deception, and delicacy in Jekyll and Hyde

Andrew De Young

Although The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not

often classified with the detective novels of the Victorian era, it

shares many characteristics with the novel of detection.1 Primary

among these is a narrative structure that deliberately withholds

from its audience the information that is necessary to interpret

the narrative’s central action, fully revealing this information

only at the end – a narrative structure that has come to be known

as mystery. That the mystery in Jekyll and Hyde also concerns

a crime – specifically, a murder – only strengthens the connec-

tions between the text and the Victorian detective story. Yet there

is one crucial genre convention the novella does not adopt that

prevents it from being classified as a detective novel: it lacks a

detective, professional or habitual amateur.

This absence may at first seem peculiar, especially given the

well-documented popularity that the detective story enjoyed dur-

ing the era in which Jekyll and Hyde first appeared. The omission

may have had something to do with Stevenson’s attitude toward

the detective genre. Writing late in his career on the composition

of The Wrecker, Stevenson declared that he ‘had at long been

at once attracted and repelled by the modern form of the police

novel or mystery story.’2 Yet, the detective’s absence also has

roots in the broader forces of history and culture. Although many

Victorian writers portrayed the detective as a hero and the prac-

tice of detection as a positive force in British society, there was a

coexisting tradition that figured the detective as a low, criminal,

and foreign Other, and detection as an activity tainted by ele-

ments of duplicity, prurience, and the invasion of privacy. This

Stevenson6.indb 181 23/10/2009 19:25


portrayal had an implied class component: although detectives

might be necessary figures in the urban slums, the thinking went,

the middle and upper classes were self-policing, and so had no

need for the indelicate profession of detection.

In the context of a middle-class desire to be self-policing, the

absence of the detective in Jekyll and Hyde begins to make

some sense. The novella, after all, concerns a crime commit-

ted by a member of the middle class, and Stevenson’s original

middle-class audience might be reasonably expected to feel

some discomfort at the notion of a detective investigating one

of their own. The absence of the detective, thus, creates a sense

of comfort as it advances the notion that the members of the

middle class do not need a detective, that they can ‘take care of

their own.’ However, this proves to be a short-lived comfort, as

another middle-class figure – Mr. Utterson – is forced to become

a detective and perform the very activities that had caused so

much discomfort in the first place. Ultimately, then, the effect

of the detective’s absence in Jekyll and Hyde is paradoxical: it

points to the need for a detective to be present.

Of course, this argument must first contend with the fact that

the professional detective in Jekyll and Hyde is not, strictly

speaking, absent at all. The text has a detective in Inspector

Newcomen, who appears in the novella’s fourth chapter, titled

‘The Carew Murder Case.’ It is in this chapter, which follows

Mr Edward Hyde’s murder of Sir Danvers Carew, where the text

comes closest to being not just a novel of detection, but a true

detective novel. Stevenson’s treatment of Inspector Newcomen,

however, is peculiar: in the first place, he seems to avoid describ-

ing the detective. The text tells us, for instance, that a nearby wit-

ness ‘called for the police’ after the murder had taken place, but

it does not describe the policemen who respond to the call, nor

what they do after they arrive on the scene of the crime. Instead,

Stevenson lapses into the passive voice, telling us that a ‘purse

and a gold watch were found upon the victim’ and that the evi-

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183Andrew De Young

dence ‘was brought to [Mr. Utterson] the next morning’ (p. 22).

Stevenson thus implies the presence of a detective rather than

stating it outright, almost as if hesitating to grant Newcomen

entry into the text. By contrast, more traditional Victorian detec-

tive novels tend to dwell on descriptions of the central detective’s

appearance and personality; Dr Watson’s detailed description of

Sherlock Holmes in the first and second chapters of A Study in

Scarlet is a perfect example. In the Victorian detective novel, the

detective himself is precisely the point; in Jekyll and Hyde, he is

a nonentity.

We first find an acknowledgement that a detective is even

present after Mr Utterson, the lawyer who will become the

novella’s central figure, identifies the victim’s body as that of

MP Danvers Carew. Newcomen replies with shock: ‘‘Good God,

sir,’ exclaimed the officer, ‘is it possible?’ And the next moment

his eye lighted up with professional ambition’ (p. 22). The first

portrayal of the figure of the detective in the text is thus a nega-

tive one: it casts the detective as a hack more interested in career

advancement than in the sensitive treatment of the victim’s

friends or the capture of a dangerous criminal. From here, the

text further establishes the detective as a negative figure by

casting him as incompetent. After a perfunctory investigation,

Newcomen brashly declares that ‘I have [Hyde] in my hand,’ but

then fails to follow through on his boast (p. 24).

To characterise the detective’s place in Jekyll and Hyde as

absence, then, is not too strong but too weak. The text’s treat-

ment of Newcomen – initially refusing to describe him, then

deigning to describe him only in negative terms – suggests not

passive omission, but active rejection. D. A. Miller has argued

that in the Victorian novel ‘the police never quite emerge from the

ghetto in which the novel generally confines them’ (p. 3). Miller’s

assertion is clearly true in Jekyll and Hyde, for after first refus-

ing to describe Newcomen and then describing him as a negative

figure, the text quite literally ghettoises the detective. Together,

Stevenson6.indb 183 23/10/2009 19:25


Utterson and Newcomen go to a ‘dismal quarter of Soho,’ where

Edward Hyde shares a neighbourhood with a ‘gin palace, a low

French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and

twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the door-

ways, and many women of many different nationalities passing

out, key in hand, to have a morning glass’ (p. 23). Newcomen

never emerges from this ghetto, and his ultimate failure to cap-

ture Hyde can be seen as a result of this. While the detective is

forced to remain in Soho, Hyde is allowed to metamorphose into

the respectable Henry Jekyll, and to take refuge exactly where

the detective cannot follow him: the respectable neighbourhoods

of the middle class.

As I have suggested, the banishment and ghettoization of the

detective that we see in Jekyll and Hyde is not surprising given

the negative portrayal of detectives that was common in many

texts of the 1870s and 1880s.3 Of these texts, a good example is

‘Vidocq and French Detectives,’ an article appearing in an 1872

issue of Once a Week. Whereas other negative portrayals often

focused on one or two of the detective’s negative characteristics

at a time, ‘Vidocq and French Detectives’ is a virtual catalogue of

the strategies Victorian writers had used to ‘other’ the detective

since the 1820s. The article purports to chronicle the history of

the detective profession, and ultimately identifies French detec-

tive Eugene Francois Vidocq as the ‘father of the detective system’

(p. 276). In claiming Vidocq as the first detective, the article was

treading on firm and well-travelled ground. The British public

had first been introduced to the figure of the detective, after all,

in Vidocq’s Memoirs, which were published in 1828 and quickly

translated into English. Subsequent portrayals of the detective

drew on the Memoirs – nonfictional articles about detectives

frequently mentioned Vidocq by name, and Edgar Allan Poe’s

Dupin was loosely based on him.4

Establishing Vidocq as the progenitor of detection allows

‘Vidocq and French Detectives’ to establish detectives as Other

Stevenson6.indb 184 23/10/2009 19:25

185Andrew De Young

on several fronts simultaneously. Firstly and perhaps most

obviously, it establishes detection as an intrinsically French

profession. The association of detectives with France was a

longstanding Victorian stereotype – in fact, it had played a major

role in the public debate surrounding the 1842 establishment

of London’s first official detective agency. The French detective

system simultaneously encapsulated Victorian hopes and fears

for their own detective agency: the French police were known

for their efficiency and effectiveness, but Victorian audiences

often assumed that French detectives acted as a ‘secret police’

on behalf of a totalitarian government. In 1843, one year after

the establishment of the detective agency, Chambers’s Journal

claimed, ‘the Frenchman is under a constant supervision, ham-

pered in all his comings and goings by a system of police’.5 Later

articles frequently described French detectives as ‘Secret Police’

or ‘spies’.6

In ‘Vidocq and French Detectives,’ the writer brings up the

issue of the detective’s Frenchness by mentioning sugges-

tively that Vidocq was born ‘in a house adjoining that in which

Robespierre was born’ (p. 276) and reporting that subsequent

French detectives acted as agents provocateurs ‘whose office

it was to lead the unwary to commit themselves to words and

acts which might be construed into treason’ (p. 277). Compared

to other Victorian texts, however, this article spends relatively

little time on Vidocq’s Frenchness. For our purposes, Vidocq’s

Frenchness is important only insofar as it others the detective.

For Francophobic readers, the mere mention of the French herit-

age of detection made the detective a dangerous figure. There

were, however, other means of othering the detective.

Vidocq, in addition to being French, is also a member of the

lower, ‘criminal’ classes.7 ‘Vidocq and French Detectives’ tells us

that Vidocq grew up in ‘the lowest street in the town’ of Arras, an

area the text identifies as a ‘continental St. Giles’s [sic]’ (p. 276).

That St. Giles was one of the most notorious London slums only

Stevenson6.indb 185 23/10/2009 19:25


backs up Miller’s claim that the Victorians found it necessary

to confine the detective to a ghetto. Miller further argues that

Victorian discourse figures the world of crime and detection as

an ‘enclosed world from which it is all but impossible to escape’.8

In this formulation, detectives have more in common with the

criminals they are tasked to capture than with the upper- and

middle-class citizens it is their duty to protect. ‘Vidocq and

French Detectives’ uses this formulation, tracing Vidocq’s path

from poverty to detection by way of the intermediate step of

criminality:

We find [Vidocq], as a mere child, robbing first the till at

a neighbouring fencing-room, and next his father’s – his

elder brother having been previously sent about his busi-

ness for similar weaknesses. Antecedents such as these

could only lead to one sort of career. He fled the paternal

roof, and joined a band of the most reckless vagabonds

to be found in any civilised country. He was everything

by turns, and nothing long. In prison and out again, with

the most certain regularity; until, being treated to a longer

spell of ‘durance vile’ than was to his taste, he assumed the

rôle of the penitent. (p. 276)

In its description of Vidocq’s career as a detective, the text

focuses on the detective’s dubious motives and methods. We are

initially told that Vidocq became a detective because ‘he was dis-

gusted with crime and criminals’ (p. 276), but the text also labels

him ‘a common informer’ and suggests that he did his detective

work not for the good of society, but for personal gain (p. 276).

The writer chooses to mention, for instance, that Vidocq ‘had a

salary of four pounds a-month, and a premium for each arrest,

it may be imagined that he took care that the number should not

fall short’ (p. 275). So much for the detective’s motives; his meth-

ods, meanwhile, prove to be methods primarily of deception – he

Stevenson6.indb 186 23/10/2009 19:25

187Andrew De Young

befriends his ‘victims’ (p. 275), as the text calls them, before

betraying them to police, adopts disguises so convincing ‘that his

own brother could not recognise him’ (p. 276), and his successors

‘fabricated evidence without scruple, when convenient’ (p. 277).

‘Vidocq and French Detectives,’ as we have seen, focuses on the

detective’s negative characteristics – his Frenchness, his origins

in the criminal classes, his dubious motives, and his deceptive

methods – but this does not mean that the detective was always

seen as a negative figure in Victorian society. Articles on the

detective appearing at intervals throughout the nineteenth cen-

tury suggest that Victorian audiences tolerated the detective if

he stayed in the ghetto in which they had mentally confined him.

When practiced in the slums, the detective’s French methods of

surveillance and control were a comfort, not a threat; for exam-

ple, in an 1870 article in Chambers’s Journal, the writer speaks

approvingly of the detective’s familiarity with the criminal

classes: ‘His cunning is not exceeded by that of the acutest rascal

that ever polluted the earth; he is up to every trick and dodge that

ever sharper knew or dicer played.’9

This observation – that the detective, although he was figured

in Victorian texts as Other, was not threatening when he was con-

fined to a ghetto – brings us back to Jekyll and Hyde, a novel of

detection in which the detective, Inspector Newcomen, has been

discredited and ghettoised. This expulsion makes sense in light

of the othering of the detective that we have seen in ‘Vidocq and

French Detectives.’ Jekyll and Hyde, after all, does not take place

in the enclosed ghetto of the criminal classes but in the world

of bourgeois Victorian professionalism.10 In response to middle-

class preferences, the elusive narrator of the first eight chapters

cannot allow Newcomen to remain in the text; the detective

must stay in his ghetto. But Jekyll and Hyde is still, crucially,

a novel of detection, and regardless of the presence or absence

of a detective, detection in one form or another must take place.

Jekyll and Hyde can banish the detective, but it cannot dispense

Stevenson6.indb 187 23/10/2009 19:25


with the detective function.11 The text is thus caught in a bind

between detecting otherness – that is, detecting Henry Jekyll’s

literal Other, Edward Hyde – and othering detection.

The ambiguity of the approach to law-enforcement in Jekyll

and Hyde is evident early on, in the novella’s first chapter. This

chapter begins with Enfield’s story, told to Utterson, of a time

when he was walking the dark, abandoned streets of London, ‘till

at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens

and begins to long for the sight of a policeman.’12 (Immediately

after Enfield expresses this longing, however, his narrative shifts

focus to demonstrate that such a longing is, in some sense, mis-

placed – for even after Mr Hyde arrives on the scene and way

‘tramples over’ a young girl, the private citizens on the scene

do not turn to the police but reveal themselves to be competent

amateur policeman. Enfield, for instance, says that he immedi-

ately ‘took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him

back to where there was already quite a group about the scream-

ing child.’ (p. 9). The people who have gathered around Hyde’s

victim also perform a policing role; as Enfield puts it, ‘We told

the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as

should make his name stink from one end of London to the other.’

(p. 9). Hyde, in response to this threat of scandal, agrees to pay

the victim and her family for their silence. Thus, although this

group of private citizens lacks the official power to enforce order,

its unofficial methods of enforcement prove equally effective.

Like the episode in which Inspector Newcomen was introduced

only to be banished from Stevenson’s text, Enfield’s narrative in

the first chapter of Jekyll and Hyde marginalises the police. By

portraying regular citizens led by the gentleman Enfield success-

fully enforcing order on Hyde, passing as a gentleman, without

the help of the police, the narrative suggests that the middle and

upper classes are self-policing. However, by the end of Enfield’s

story, even this notion is called into question – for while Enfield

and the other bourgeois professionals are able to police, they are

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189Andrew De Young

not, crucially, able to detect. This becomes clear late in the first

chapter, when Utterson inquires further into Hyde’s identity and

Enfield strenuously demurs by declaring:

I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes

too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a

question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on

the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others;

and presently some bland old bird (the last you would

have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back

garden and the family have to change their name. No,

sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer

Street, the less I ask. (p. 11)

As it relates to detectives and detection, this passage simulta-

neously accomplishes several things, some of them contradic-

tory. It associates one of the primary activities of the detective

– asking questions – with a lack of ‘delicacy’ (p. 11). In this

way, it justifies the marginalization of the detective by defining

detection in opposition to bourgeois values: gentleman do not

ask questions, but detectives do; therefore, the gentleman is

defined in part by the fact that he refuses to take on the role of a

detective, and the detective is defined in part by the fact that he is

not a gentleman. However, Enfield’s discourse on the indelicacy

of asking questions would suggest the need for someone else

to take on this function, that is, the need for the detective not

to be marginalised, but to be given free rein to investigate the

supposedly self-policing middle class. Enfield can police, but he

cannot detect; he can capture and punish Hyde, but he cannot

save Jekyll but he cannot solve the mystery that connects him

with Jekyll; he can curb and contain deviance, but he cannot cor-

rect or resolve it – because he does not wish to when it involves

someone of his own class.

Enfield’s narrative in this first chapter, moreover, provides

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a kind of template for the entire novella. The text banishes the

detective, but it cannot banish the detective function. Rather, the

detective’s othered characteristics are dispersed throughout the

text, and taken up by the very bourgeois figures who sought to

reject them in the first place. For the most part, these character-

istics come to rest on Mr Utterson, the lawyer who becomes the

novella’s amateur detective.

The lack of a professional detective figure places Utterson in

the uncomfortable position of having to investigate his client and

friend, Dr Jekyll. As in ‘Vidocq and French Detectives,’ Utterson

must become an informant if he is to fill the role of detective.

In truth, Utterson appears to be well placed to fill this role,

for we are told that ‘it was frequently his fortune to be the last

reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of

down-going men’ (p. 7). However, other elements of Utterson’s

character make him ill equipped to be a detective. Especially dis-

qualifying is Utterson’s permissive attitude toward the misdeeds

of his peers, described in the first chapter: ‘he had an approved

tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy,

at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and

in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove.’ (p. 7).

This passage, it should be noted, does not question Utterson’s

ability to detect; rather, it questions his motives. An ascetic with

a tendency to live vicariously through the misdeeds of others, he

is more likely to accept Jekyll’s crimes than to curb them.

Even as it calls Utterson’s motives into question, moreover, the

passage echoes similar Victorian questions about the motives and

methods of detectives. The history of the London Metropolitan

police offers many instances when the practice of detection prob-

lematised the relationship between policeman and criminal. The

most famous example is perhaps the so-called ‘Popay Incident’ of

1831, in which a police officer infiltrated a political rally, incited

the members to violence, and then arrested the guilty parties –

but it is by no means the only example. In 1877, for example,

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191Andrew De Young

four police inspectors were found to have been using their posi-

tions to run a fraudulent betting ring.13 Philip Thurmond Smith,

moreover, writes of an incident in the 1860s in which ‘a constable

hid behind a tree to watch ‘indecent acts’ being committed in

Hyde Park. The constable arrested the parties only afterward,

instead of preventing the liaison.’14 These incidents of police

malfeasance offered vivid examples of the means by which the

supposedly virtuous detection of crime might actually lead the

detective to a kind of complicity in crime – ranging from provok-

ing crimes in order to detect them, detecting in order to satisfy a

prurient curiosity, or even using one’s position as a detective as

a front for criminal enterprise. In the context of these incidents,

Stevenson’s original readers may have harboured similar doubts

about Mr Utterson: was his investigation of Dr Jekyll motivated

by a concern for his friend’s well-being, or by a desire to observe

his illicit pleasures and experience them vicariously?

When Utterson does adopt the role of detective, he does so half-

heartedly and with little success. Initially, his curiosity drives

him to behave as a detective; even after Enfield has frustrated

his inquiries, Utterson discovers a mention of Hyde in Jekyll’s

will and utters the famous phrase: ‘If he be Mr Hyde, I shall be

Mr Seek’ (p. 15). However, Utterson’s determination is short-

lived, for only a few pages later he declares, ‘Ay, I must put my

shoulder to the wheel – if Jekyll will but let me’ (p. 19). Here, far

from being driven by an insatiable curiosity to discover the truth,

Utterson shows that he is only willing to fully adopt the role of

the detective if Jekyll willingly submits himself to detection.

Jekyll is most certainly not willing to submit himself to detec-

tion, and for the remainder of the novella it is often he who

arrests Utterson’s attempts at discovery. Jekyll’s method of

arresting detection demonstrates that the same bourgeois values

that gave rise to effective unofficial policing methods in Enfield’s

narrative are equally effective at thwarting policing methods. For

example, when Utterson initially questions Jekyll about Hyde,

Stevenson6.indb 191 23/10/2009 19:25


Jekyll appeals to his own authority, saying, ‘I do not care to hear

more,’ and from the same authority accuses Utterson of breaking

an agreement: ‘This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop.’

He goes on to declare, ‘It is one of those affairs that cannot be

mended by talking,’ and ‘this is a private matter, and I beg of you

to let it sleep’ (p. 20). After Hyde’s murder of Sir Danvers Carew

renews Utterson’s interest in the case, Jekyll once more rebuffs

his inquiries by assuring him that ‘I have had a lesson’ but that

the threat is now gone (p. 26).

Utterson later appears to internalise the message that his efforts

at detection are unwanted, and in the book’s closing chapters he

no longer requires Jekyll’s resistance to give up detecting. This is

especially evident in a chapter called ‘The Last Night,’ in which

Poole, Jekyll’s servant, asks Utterson to intervene on behalf of

his employer. Jekyll, it appears, has been locked his chambers

for days – but it is Hyde’s voice, strangely, that Poole hears com-

ing out of the sealed room. To get to the bottom of the mystery,

Utterson must perform an act of detection: he must break down

the door and see what is inside. However, he is reluctant to do

this, and initially attempts to justify his inaction by coming up

with a non-threatening interpretation of the available evidence.

Utterson speculates that Jekyll is ‘seized with one of those

maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer,’ and assures

Poole that this theory, if correct, ‘delivers us from all exorbitant

alarms’ (p. 36). In spite of Utterson’s theory – which is, readers

will observe, at least partially correct – Poole insists that his mas-

ter has been killed. Utterson, for his part, almost immediately

admits that he agrees with Poole (p. 37), revealing that his initial

interpretation was disingenuous; he had suspected the worst all

along but wished to avoid performing the act of detection neces-

sary to confirm his suspicions.

It is not just the characters of Jekyll and Hyde who experi-

ence the discomfort of being thrust into the role of detective; the

novella’s bourgeois audience is made to feel discomfort as well,

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193Andrew De Young

as readers themselves are forced to become detectives. To a cer-

tain extent, all detective stories cause readers to act as detectives,

and thus all Victorian detective stories dealing with middle- or

upper-class crime can be said to inspire feelings of discomfort

as they ask readers to investigate their peers or social betters.

However, more traditional detective stories assuage this discom-

fort through the presence of a professional or amateur detective

primarily responsible for penetrating the mystery, which allows

readers to disavow the active practice of detection – the detective

is doing all the work, while the reader is passively watching the

results.15 In Jekyll and Hyde, by contrast, the lack of a strong

detective figure offers readers no such solace, for given Utterson’s

failure to fully adopt the role of detective, if the mystery is solved

at all it must be the reader who performed the indelicacy of

solving it. The text assists this discomfort by calling attention to

elements of detection inherent in the activity of reading. Most

of Utterson’s breakthroughs of detection result from reading:

he first discovers the connection between Jekyll and Hyde by

rereading Jekyll’s will, later notices a ‘singular resemblance’ (p.

36) between the handwriting of the two, and ultimately discovers

the truth by reading Jekyll’s written account of the case.

This account, which stands as the last chapter of the novella,

would seem, at first, to require no readerly acts of detection. The

chapter’s title, for instance, advertises a ‘Full Statement of the

Case,’ creating the expectation that the audience will be allowed

to passively watch as Jekyll performs a voluntary act of self-

disclosure. His account, however, conceals as much as it reveals,

forcing readers to continue acting as detectives as they filter

through Jekyll’s obscure writing. The most blatant omission,

perhaps, is the text’s unwillingness to reveal exactly the nature

of Jekyll’s crimes. Jekyll admits early on that he is guilty of ‘a

certain impatient gaiety of disposition’ (p. 47), a vague phrase

that, according to Katherine Linehan could have referred to any-

thing from prostitution to a ‘soul-endangering levity’ opposed to

Stevenson6.indb 193 23/10/2009 19:25


the ‘self-disciplined moral earnestness’ of ‘the Evangelical cast

of Victorian Christianity.’16 Throughout the rest of the chapter,

Jekyll refers frequently to his ‘pleasures’ (p. 52), which he

characterises as ‘undignified’ (p. 53) – but again, he declines to

explicitly describe them.

This uncertainty surrounding Jekyll’s crimes also extends to

the criminal who committed the crimes – given the fluidity of

the dual character of Jekyll/Hyde, it is difficult to determine

precisely who the guilty party is. Early in his narrative, Jekyll

writes that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two,’ before going

on to guess that his discovery of humanity’s double identity is

actually a conservative estimate: ‘I hazard the guess that man

will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious,

incongruous and independent denizens’ (p. 48). The subsequent

narrative proves Jekyll’s guess right, for the narrating ‘I’ of this

chapter is an extremely inconsistent persona. For the most part,

the ‘I’ attempts to occupy the figure of Henry Jekyll and keep

a strict separation between himself and Edward Hyde, at one

point declaring, ‘He, I say – I cannot say, I’ (p. 59). Even as the ‘I’

attempts to separate himself from Hyde, however, he inadvert-

ently separates himself from Jekyll as well, as in the following

passage where the narrative persona refers to Jekyll in the third

person: ‘It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty.

Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly

unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to

undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered’

(p. 53). Sometimes, moreover, the ‘I’ is clearly Hyde, as in this

passage describing the murder of Danvers Carew: ‘Instantly the

spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I

mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow’ (p.

56). In order to come away from this concluding chapter with

any reliable sense of what has occurred in the narrative, readers

must act as detectives, piecing together the truth from available

clues. Though readers only metaphorically act as detectives, the

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195Andrew De Young

textual interpretation uncovers the crimes and hypocrisies of a

middle-class character and so may be supposed to involve the

probable middle-class reader with a deep sense of ambivalence.

When contextualised within the history and development

of the detective genre in Britain, the effects of the absence of a

detective in Jekyll and Hyde may seem, at first, to be nothing

but a footnote. To adherents of the Victorian detective story,

Stevenson’s text is easily overshadowed by Arthur Conan Doyle’s

A Study in Scarlet, which appeared only one year after Jekyll

and Hyde. As Ian Ousby would have it, ‘one finds it difficult

to resist the impression that authors [writing in the 1870s and

1880s] were merely marking time until the publication of Doyle’s

Sherlock Holmes stories.’17 However, upon further analysis,

Jekyll and Hyde deserves a more prominent place in the story of

Victorian detective fiction. Stevenson’s text may begin with the

banishment and marginalization of the detective, but it ends by

proving the detective’s necessity, for the bourgeois figures who

take his place as amateur detectives are unable to adequately

uncover the crime. Jekyll and Hyde ultimately reveals the figure

of the detective in late-Victorian England to be neither hero nor

villain, but scapegoat, a figure who is simultaneously admired

and vilified for his ability to perform the task that mainstream

society is unwilling to perform: that of detection.

Notes

1 The relationship of Jekyll and Hyde to the detective story has been a question of debate. Alan Sandison says that JH is (among many other things) ‘an extraordinarily interesting and sophisticated detective-story.’ —Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (New York/London: St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan,1996), p. 218. For Pamela M. Price-Anisman (in a 1997 document at www.yale.edu/ynhti/pubs/A4/price-anisman.html ) ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an excellent introduction to detective fiction’. Richard Scholar argues that the plot of J&H is principally that of a detective case, in ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A Case-

Stevenson6.indb 195 23/10/2009 19:25


Study in Translation’ Translation and Literature 7 (1) (1998), pp. 42-55; but his thesis is refuted by Jean-Pierre Naugrette who claims it only ‘pretends to be such’ – ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde est-il un roman policier?’ Confluences 20 (2002), 85-111. Richard Dury identifies plot and detective-figure as the two elements most in common with the genre, but points out that the last chapter in particular go beyond its conventions by the introduction of supernatural elements. – The Annotated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 2nd ed. (Genoa: ECIG, 2005), pp. 43-4.

2 Quoted in A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1958), p. 14.

3 E.g. ‘Detectives as They Are’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 341 (July 1870). ‘Vidocq and French Detectives’, in Once a Week 9:221 (March 1872). ‘French Detectives’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 1:3 (Jan. 1884). ‘Our Detective Police’, in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 1:22 (May 1884); all articles anon.

4 T. J. Binyon, The Detective in Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 5.

5 Anon., ‘The Police of Paris.’ Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 576 (1843: Feb.), 28.

6 ‘French Detectives’, p. 48; and ‘Our Detective Police’, p. 339.

7 During this period, the ‘criminal class’ was largely conceived on naturalistic terms, and many envisioned the ‘habitual offender’ as being a particular species of human. According to Martin Weiner, ‘The writings of medical men and physiologists merged in the general middle-class mind with Darwinian images to establish a picture of most repeat offenders as, indeed, habitual and of their illegality, like the inebriate’s drinking, as not freely chosen and thus not responsive to rational deterrents’ (p. 300).

8 D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 276.

9 ‘Detectives as They Are.’ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 341 (1870: July), 445.

10 For more on the significance of bourgeois professionalism in Jekyll and Hyde, see Stephen Arata, ‘The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde’, Criticism 37.2 (1995), 233-59.

Stevenson6.indb 196 23/10/2009 19:25

197Andrew De Young

11 In The Novel and the Police, (p. 42) Miller makes a similar argument about Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, which also introduces a detective character – Inspector Cuff – only to banish him from the text later on.

12 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. by Katherine Linehan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), p. 7; henceforth cited in the text by page number only.

13 Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) p. 130.

14 Phillip Thurmond Smith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing, Public Order, and the London Metropolitan Police (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), p. 71.

15 I make this same point at greater length in ‘“A Worthy Man and a Rogue”: Detectives and Detection in Two Late-Victorian Novellas’, MA Essay, University of St. Thomas, 2008.

16 Stevenson, p. 47-48, n2. Dury, however, says ‘it is legitimate to infer’ that Hyde’s activities ‘involve sexual excess: he is created to deal with Jekyll’s ‘impatient gaiety of disposition’ and his concealed ‘pleasures’ [...] and the first transformation is accompanied by ‘a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy’ [...], after which Jekyll habitually changes into Hyde ‘for his pleasures’, at first merely ‘undignified’ but later sadistic. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. by Richard Dury (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. xxix-xxx.

17 Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven, p. 136.

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199Nicoletta Brazzelli

Maps, treasures and imaginary lands: Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines as a response to Stevenson’s Treasure Island

Nicoletta Brazzelli

1. Personal and literary relationships

Henry Rider Haggard claimed, during a conversation with one

of his brothers, that he could write a better and more success-

ful adventure story than the immediately popular Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Treasure Island. When Stevenson’s masterpiece

appeared in 1883, Haggard did not think much of it and, accord-

ing to a well-known anecdote, made a five-shilling bet that he

himself could write a best-seller for boys and adults alike. In six

weeks, he wrote King Solomon’s Mines, the narrative story of a

treasure hunt accomplished by three English gentlemen, search-

ing for a legendary diamond mine in a lost land in South Africa.1

Published in 1885, this self-declared adventure romance was an

instant success; it has never gone out of print since then.

In my essay, I will focus firstly on the literary relationships

between the two writers and on their re-evaluation of the fic-

tional form of romance; and secondly on the textual connections

between their works, especially related to recurring themes of

late nineteenth century adventure stories, such as maps charting

imaginary lands and masculine quests for hidden treasures. On

the whole, Stevenson and Haggard belonged to the same cul-

tural and ideological climate, based on the deep fascination for

a mythical past springing from the English tradition of sea voy-

ages in Stevenson’s case, or for the mysterious heritage of a lost

humanity, inhabiting the inner wilderness of Africa in Haggard’s

fiction.

In The Days of my Life Haggard writes: ‘I read in one of the

Stevenson6.indb 199 23/10/2009 19:25


weekly papers a notice of Stevenson’s Treasure Island so lauda-

tory that I procured and studied that work, and was impelled by its

perusal to try to write a book for boys.’2 Although the two authors

never met, the relationship between their families is well known.

The Scottish writer had been in touch with one of Haggard’s

brothers, Alfred, when King Solomon’s Mines was published;

Stevenson’s letter addressed to Alfred on 1 April 1885 does not

seem to consider Rider Haggard’s romance a remarkable literary

achievement: ‘The worst work so often succeeds better than the

best; financial success so often accompanies relaxation of instead

of increase of vigour.’3 Stevenson’s mixed reaction after receiving

King Solomon’s Mines includes a fair amount of substantially

critical remarks. Thus, the Scottish author writes to Haggard:

You should be more careful; you do quite well enough to

take more trouble, and some parts of your book are infi-

nitely beneath you. But I find there flashes of a fine weird

imagination and a fine poetic use and command of the

savage way of talking: things which both thrilled me (The

Letters, V, p. 134).

However, the ‘weird imagination’ of his rival is enthusiastically

praised by the author of Treasure Island, in a following letter,

when Stevenson even suggested the opportunity of a literary

partnership.4 It is worth remembering that Bazett Haggard,

another of Henry’s brothers, became Stevenson’s last great friend

in Samoa, and thanks to such a friendship we have a few records

of Bazett’s eccentric life in the South Seas. It is not by chance that

Stevenson described him warmly as his ‘companion in arms’ and

felt that he knew Henry Rider through Bazett.5

Haggard’s plan to outdo Stevenson and the supposed spirit

of competition underlying his first literary success need to be

related to his biography: born in Norfolk in 1856, Haggard went

to Natal in 1875 and worked as a colonial administrator in that

Stevenson6.indb 200 23/10/2009 19:25


area during the Zulu War and the first Boer War.6 To construct

his own brand of romance and write King Solomon’s Mines, he

decided to dig into his own experiences, employing the typical

devices of adventure stories.7 South Africa, in his imagination,

combined the features of a familiar ground and, at the same time,

of a dark ‘terra incognita’.

2. The revival of late Victorian romance from literary

theory to fictional practice

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, an extensive debate

on the social role and aesthetical values of fiction took place in

Great Britain.8 The theory and practice of romance became a

crucial question in a period characterised by the emergence of

adventure stories set in the colonies conveying imperial ideology

through the figures of explorers and treasure seekers to a large

public of boys and grown up men.9 Writers such as Stevenson

and Haggard created a new space for adventures set in uninhab-

ited islands, jungles, swamps, ‘uncivilised’ and perilous places;

the rewards for their heroes, affirming the ideal British values

all over the world, were material wealth and the taming of wild

nature.

Stevenson’s contribution to the debate is well-known, but

Haggard took part in the debate too: in 1877 he published a short

essay in the Contemporary Review, entitled ‘About Fiction’,

and developed a series of theoretical reflections on romance.10

Haggard associates romance with basic instincts and primary

human passions, highlighting its universal character; as the

harbinger of a fantastic world, romance seems to have no rela-

tionship with contemporary reality. Stevenson himself had cel-

ebrated the centrality of romance in high art in several writings,

such as ‘A Gossip on Romance’ (1882), based on the idea that fic-

tion is to the adult man what play is to the child, and ‘A Humble

Remonstrance’ (1884), which conveys the belief that the work of

art is characterised by its immeasurable difference from life.11

Stevenson6.indb 201 23/10/2009 19:25


Both Stevenson and Haggard underlined the imaginative and

ethical role of fiction; yet at the same time their romances imply

an ideological vision and a hierarchical construction of the world.

Through the pattern of the quest narrative,12 both historical and

contemporary, the search for buried treasures plunged the read-

ers into uncharted territories; conventional masculine codes,

together with the principles of law and order, guided choice in

a context where the supreme value of duty and personal courage

could justify and reinforce a rigid social structure.

Treasure Island, opening in the English countryside, before

moving to the Atlantic and then to a wild imaginary island,

emphasises the hierarchical structure of eighteenth century soci-

ety, where the clash between the middle-class masters and the

pirates involves a clear definition of good and evil, even though

a closer examination reveals ambiguities. Haggard’s rival work,

drawing on contemporary events and characters, changes and

simplifies the development of the British Empire in South Africa

by reshaping it into an exciting tale of adventure. Despite the

different perspectives in space and time, it is worth noticing that

the dark continent does appear in the last page of Stevenson’s

work, through the reference to the ‘old Negress’, with whom the

one-legged pirate Long John Silver probably lives in comfort.

The conventions of children’s literature mark both texts.13

Though the dedication of King Solomon’s Mines is addressed ‘to

all the big and little boys who read it’,14 the explicit sexual imagery

seems to take craftily into account an adult audience. The most

significant difference between the two adventure stories lies

certainly in their narrators: Jim Hawkins is a boy in search of

a father figure, and Stevenson’s work follows the pattern of a

Bildungsroman, whereas Allan Quatermain is a fifty-five-year-old

man, an elephant hunter and ivory trader, an unprepossessing

character, not at all an intellectual but certainly an experienced

British explorer. King Solomon’s Mines unfolds the African

adventures of the narrator, who teams up with Sir Henry Curtis,

Stevenson6.indb 202 23/10/2009 19:25


an aristocrat, and Captain John Good, a retired naval officer, on

a quest initiated by a fifteenth-century Portuguese map. After

crossing a desert and a mountain range, they reach the valley

where the mysterious diamond mines are located, and where the

Kukuana tribe is ruled by a vicious native king. The ‘white men’

support the rightful ruler of Kukuanaland and after a bitter war

they are allowed to secure a fair amount of the coveted diamonds

and return home. The transformation of masculine identities in

their relation to otherness is a central theme in Haggard, and it is

also a crucial issue in Treasure Island. Jim learns and develops

through a growing understanding of the principles of justice, the

values of social order and the significance of life and death. In a

sense, Stevenson’s Jim learns much more, yet, at the same time,

he is to some extent a passive tool in the hands of the adults who

assume the role of father figures towards him.

3. Cartographies of the Empire

A strange, dragon-like map shapes the very beginning of Treasure

Island, as Stevenson remarks in ‘My First Book: “Treasure

Island” ’, first published in The Idler in 1894. Here he tells his

readers of how, during a rainy August holiday in Scotland, spent

with his twelve-year-old stepson, he drew a map:

I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I

thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my

fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that

pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness

of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure

Island’.15

Stevenson observes that the characters of the book began to

appear to him among imaginary woods and seas, adding: ‘The

map was the chief part of my plot. I might almost say it was the

whole’ (‘My First Book’, p. 127). Thus, the work of imagination is

Stevenson6.indb 203 23/10/2009 19:25


stimulated by the drawing, and leads to the vision of characters

moving in a landscape.

Though the topography and landscape features of Stevenson’s

island were apparently borrowed from California scenery (the

Monterey peninsula and Silverado) it is also clearly connected

with Gothic sensibility in its association with night, darkness,

mist and fear. At the same time it evokes a paradise of palm trees

and sapphire seas, white beaches and exotic birds; an equato-

rial space to be explored and appropriated.16 The island is the

object of the quest,17 but Jim is immediately repelled by it: ‘From

the very first look onward, I hated the very thought of Treasure

Island.’18 The island constitutes a stage where deceptions are

performed, not unlike Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest. The

island is also unwelcoming and dangerous:

Where Silver stood with his lieutenant all was still in

shadow, and they waded knee deep in a low, white vapour

that had crawled during the night out of the morass. The

chill and the vapour together told a poor tale of the island.

It was plainly a damp, feverish, unhealthy spot (Treasure

Island, p. 78).

The signature of captain Flint on the map connects the draw-

ing with the ancient and cruel world of buccaneers. The physical

features and their names stimulate the reader’s imagination and

in the plot the sheet of paper containing the map is crucial, and

clearly connected with the various clues on the ground in the

final phase of the search.

The fascination of maps, the blank spaces filled by the colonial

imagination, is even more remarkable in Haggard’s romance. The

Empire had been created by mapping, naming, classifying the

unknown, and the attraction of the colonies lay in their mystery

and apparent blankness. As in Treasure Island the map is a cen-

tral plot device in King Solomon’s Mines and embodies the myth

Stevenson6.indb 204 23/10/2009 19:25


of a seemingly empty and mysterious landscape. In addition,

Haggard’s map is a bodyscape of Africa portrayed as a woman.19

Henry Rider Haggard was very proud of this invention and the

effect of realism it created – even greater than in Treasure Island

because the map is actually inserted in the text rather than pre-

ceding it like a frontispiece. His satisfaction is revealed when he

relates an amusing episode in the London underground, while

taking the original map to the Cassell publishing house:

In the carriage of the Underground Railway I perceived

an old lady engaged in a close, indeed an almost ferocious

study of the map printed at the beginning of the printed

volume which rested on her knees. Drawing the original

map from my pocket, I placed it on my knee and began

to study it with like attention (The Days of My Life, I, p.

234).

The map is both inside the space of the text yet also outside it

(as paratext), and so captures the imagination of the reader by its

ambiguous status and its apparent reality – attesting documen-

tary status in what is known to be a fictional narrative. Haggard

playfully increases the ambiguity by producing the ‘real’ map and

mirroring the readers’ imaginative fascination. Haggard invents

an ancient map, the copy of a chart drawn by a Portuguese

trader, Josè da Silvestra, dying of hunger on a mountain named

Sheba’s Breast, somewhere in Southern Africa. The narrative

techniques aim at engaging the faculties of interpreting spatial

representation; the picture printed in the first pages of the text

gives credibility to the whole plot.

The map represents a motivation and tool of colonial power,

because the exotic territory appears mysterious but, at the same

time, knowable and open to the white domination.20 First of

all, it is a symbol of conceptual appropriation that validates the

white man’s power and therefore his exploitation of the earth’s

Stevenson6.indb 205 23/10/2009 19:25


resources. However, Haggard’s map is also charged with a per-

sonal, erotic meaning. Haggard’s Africa embodies the colonial

fantasy of the virgin territory.21 At the centre of Haggard’s map

lie two breast-like mountain peaks, Solomon’s road leads to the

‘koppje’, the navel, while the stone idols called ‘Three Witches’

mark the threshold leading to the mouth of the treasure cave, a

kind of vaginal entrance where the heroes are led by the treacher-

ous Gagool.

The maps are crucial to both romances, as they mark the

beginning and the end of the two stories, and both are explicitly

associated with the appropriation of huge treasures. Moreover,

the charts apparently give their owners a right to the colonial

exploitation of the land, so validating the dreams and fantasies

of Britain’s colonial power. The device of the map reproduced

directly in the first pages of the text, like an artefact in its declared

objectivity, helps create the illusion of a real territory inhabited

both by the adventurers and by the fascinated readers.

4. The quest for wealth

The goal of the hero’s adventurous quest, both in Treasure Island

and in King Solomon’s Mines, is the achievement of wealth. The

search for riches, in the shape of money, gold and diamonds,

is romanticised, providing an idealistic representation of the

mechanisms of the capitalist profit. In the heyday of Victorian

imperialism, Treasure Island retrieves an eighteenth-century

period of colonial expansion and consolidation, the recreation

of a lost past, where the pirates are objects of admiration and

fear. Stevenson’s operation suggests both a displacement from

contemporary high capitalism, and it represents, in an idealised

and more innocent world, the need for economic production in

the contemporary world.

The material interests of the pirates and of the gentry financing

the sea voyage seem identical.22 The romance of fabulous wealth

is emphasised at the opening of the chest, when Jim exclaims:

Stevenson6.indb 206 23/10/2009 19:25


‘doubloons and double guineas and moroides and sequins,

[. . .] strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps

of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces,

and pieces bored through the middle’ (Treasure Island, p. 199).

The words suggest far-away places, buccaneering enterprises

and also the hoards from the world of the Arabian Nights; the

illusion created by the words ushers another kind of fancy: when

the map is traded to the pirates, they finger it as if it were the

treasure itself, as if a piece of paper may create an illusion of

wealth, which is actually what happens with bank notes.

For his part, Rider Haggard reshapes the biblical myth of

Solomon’s treasure, although in the industrial age that legend

has lost significance. In King Solomon’s Mines the space where

the treasure is buried is ghostlike and hellish, the domain of sav-

agery.23 Haggard’s mines reflect contemporary South Africa and

the diamond and gold rushes, which took place in the last dec-

ades of the nineteenth century.24 In Haggard’s romance, wealth is

removed from the savage world, where it lay motionless and did

not produce any useful profit, to be transferred to the civilised

world, and transformed into circulating capital.25

When the witch Gagool traps the British explorers in the treas-

ure chamber, she mocks the white men’s greed for the precious

stones and yells: ‘There are the bright stones ye love, white men,

as many as you will; take them, run them through your fingers,

eat of them, hee! hee! drink of them, ha! ha!’ (King Solomon’s

Mines, p. 278). But, after the killing of Gagool, Quatermain and

his friends, gaping at the huge treasure, finally satisfied, do not

seem impressed by the witch’s curse and reason like accountants:

‘We had got them; there before us were millions of pounds’ worth

of diamonds, and thousands of pounds’ worth of gold and ivory,

only to be taken away’ (p. 279).

Both in Stevenson and Haggard the treasure is depicted in

quantitative terms, as coins and precious metals and stones

that are literally brought back to life, released from their long

Stevenson6.indb 207 23/10/2009 19:25


inactivity in the island’s caves or in the mines of Kukuanaland.26

In Stevenson, once the brutal and chaotic strategies employed

by the pirates are defeated, the colonial order and laws are

finally firmly established. While on the Hispaniola the Union

Jack replaces the Jolly Roger, Quatermain, Curtis and Good,

after restoring order and appropriating the diamonds, embody

the superiority of British power in themselves. Haggard builds

up a more contemporary narrative background: not the pirate

expeditions of a pre-industrial world, but more directly a present

and future colonial expansion. Jim Hawkins, who returns home

apparently more haunted than joyful as a victor, will become

Allan Quatermain, a simplified version of the traditional man

of action. Haggard’s mapping of his story onto the Empire is

much clearer than Stevenson’s. The ‘young and old’ readers of

Haggard’s romance cannot, as Stevenson had suggested, devote

themselves to ‘daydreaming’ any longer, but must become men

of action themselves, faithful servants of the Queen.

5. Exotic landscapes

The exotic and the mysterious atmosphere, a crucial part of

nineteenth-century romance, is present in the depiction both of

the island in the Spanish Main and of the dark heart of Africa.

Traditionally, great treasures are buried in inhospitable places.

Revisited in the light of Victorian perspectives, Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe constitutes a powerful subtext to both as the myth of the

coloniser resurfaces in a different context, together with the idea

of nature mastered by reason.27

The topography of Stevenson’s island is associated with

dreams, even nightmares, in the crucial twists of the narration;

the places Jim explores seem imbued with a strong symbolism,

involving even the colours and the shape of the island:28

Grey-coloured woods covered a large part of the surface.

[…] The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires

Stevenson6.indb 208 23/10/2009 19:25


of naked rock. All were strangely shaped, and the Spy-

glass, which was by three or four hundred feet the tallest

on the island, was likewise the strangest in configuration,

running up sheer from almost every side, and then sud-

denly cut off at the top like a pedestal to put a statue on

(Treasure Island, p. 80).

While symbolically female (the treasure is located in Ben

Gunn’s cave), it is also associated with the search for manhood,

freedom, and independence. The father figures are certainly

relevant, and especially Long John Silver fulfils such a role when,

immediately after landing, he describes the island as a ‘sweet

spot’, enthusiastically emphasizing its pleasures to a boy like

Jim. It is a nurturing land, where Jim will finally grow up.

The island’s physical and vegetational forms construct a space

of the other: uninhabited, unknown, its inhospitable nature is

also revealed by its smell, indicating the presence of corruption

and death. When the final hunt begins, through ‘heavy, miry

ground’, the discovery of a skeleton strikes a harsh note, and

the seekers become acutely aware of visual and audible clues. At

last, the island has become a world of physical perceptions and a

living organism in itself, offering the treasure to the invaders in

order to preserve its inner mysteriousness:

Before us, over the tree-tops, we beheld the Cape of

the Woods fringe with surf; behind, we not only looked

down upon the anchorage and Skeleton island, but saw

a great field of open sea upon the east. Sheer above us

rose Spy-glass, here dotted with single pines, there black

with precipices. There was no sound but that of the dis-

tant breakers, mounting from all round, and the chirp of

countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail upon

the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense

of solitude (p. 187).

Stevenson6.indb 209 23/10/2009 19:25


At the same time, in both Stevenson’s and Haggard’s works,

the landscape of Otherness is considered a stage fit for masculine

actions. Thus, the land in King Solomon’s Mines is feminised,

portrayed as a naked woman to be penetrated; the adventures

must cross and ‘touch’ Sheba’s breasts to find the coveted treas-

ure, as if to achieve a sexual fulfilment:

There, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glitter-

ing like silver in the early rays of the morning sun, were

Sheba’s breasts; and stretching away for hundreds of

miles on each side of them was the great Suliman Berg.

Now that I, sitting here, attempt to describe the extraor-

dinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language seems

to fail me. I am impotent before its memory. [. . .] These

mountains standing thus, like the pillars of a gigantic

gateway, are shaped exactly like a woman’s breasts (King

Solomon’s Mines, p. 85).

The achievement of the treasure is perceived as a male viola-

tion of the African land.29 Haggard’s African topography implies

the naming of the main geographical features: the image of

Sheba is expanded into an icon of the African continent, while

in Haggard’s romance its fertility is constantly associated with

male violation.

The march into the desert discloses vistas of vast expanses of

untamed wilderness, rearranged by the imperial gaze, but the

wide Solomon’s road leads to a kind of Eden:30

The brook, of which the banks were clothed with dense

masses of a gigantic species of maidenhair fern inter-

spersed with feathery tufts of wild asparagus, babbled

away merrily at our side, the soft air murmured through

the leaves of the silver trees, doves cooed around and

bright-winged birds flashed like living gems from bough

Stevenson6.indb 210 23/10/2009 19:25


to bough. The magic of the place, combined with the

overwhelming sense of dangers left behind, and one of the

promised land reached at last, seemed to charm us into

silence (p. 109).

Haggard’s Africa is the space of the wilderness, a primi-

tive world that generates anxiety and fear, but also a place of

enchantment, because the Edenic quality of its landscape, its

lovely countryside and rivers, cattle and meadows are continually

celebrated. This emptiness and its characteristics as a ‘promised

land’ can be seen as a justification for predatory colonialism.31

The site of King Solomon’s Mines, in imaginary Kukuanaland, is

located where the ancient stone ruins near Victoria, called Great

Zimbabwe, were discovered in 1871 by the German explorer Karl

Mauch. To realistic, historical and geographical details, Haggard

mixes elements of folklore and myth, in an amazing mélange

of literary ingredients, present-day mining activity and biblical

antecedents; the place of death, where the Kukuana kings are

petrified, resembles the Valhalla of the German tradition.

In conclusion, by suggesting that the English gentlemen have

the right to keep for themselves what they have discovered

and fought for (discovery by those ‘without the law’ having no

validity) both Treasure Island and King Solomon’s Mines offer

a purified, ‘rose-colored’ vision of the Empire and of the capi-

talist enterprise,32 justifying the English dominance of a world

represented as a ‘treasure house’ waiting to be plundered.33 The

difference between the two lies in the fact that Stevenson relies

on his aesthetic integrity and his fascination for a past in which

the pirates are displaced by a more disciplined and respectable

middle-class, while Haggard wants to encourage and seduce his

readers, reminding them that the riches of Africa are still open to

robbery and conquest to incorporate a new jewel into the British

Crown.

Stevenson6.indb 211 23/10/2009 19:25


Notes

1 Lilias Haggard, The Cloak That I Left (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), p. 121.

2 Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life. An Autobiography (London: Longman, 1926), 2 vols, I, p. 220.

3 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, The Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 8 vols., V, p. 99.

4 Haggard, The Days of My Life, I, p. 220. The suggested literary partnership never occurred.

5 Victoria Manthorpe, Children of Empire. The Victorian Haggards (London: Victor Gollancz, 1996), p. 166 and p. 171. Stevenson joined other expatriates in Samoa to write a little humorous book on Bazett Haggard: Robert Louis Stevenson, An Object of Pity or the Man Haggard (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1900).

6 The main biographical and critical works on Henry Rider Haggard are: Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard. His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1968); D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard. The Great Storyteller (London: Cassell, 1981); Peter Berresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard. A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire. A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction (Cambridge - New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Tom Pocock, Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993).

7 On the adventure narrative pattern see John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976). Cf. also Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

8 Cf. Carlo Pagetti, La nuova battaglia dei libri. Il dibattito sul romanzo in Inghilterra alla fine dell’Ottocento (Bari: Adriatica, 1977).

9 Cf. Laurence Kitzan, Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire. The Rose-Colored Vision (Westport - London: Greenwood Press, 2001). On the relationship between culture and imperialism, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993).

10 Henry Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction’, Contemporary Review (February 1887), 172-180. Two articles by Haggard on the relationship

Stevenson6.indb 212 23/10/2009 19:25


between art and life had appeared the year before: Henry Rider Haggard, ‘Fact and Fiction’, Athenaeum, 3063 (July 10, 1886), 50; and Henry Rider Haggard, ‘Fact and Fiction’, Athenaeum, 3066 (July 31, 1886), 144. Cf. David H. Jackson, ‘Treasure Island as a Late-Victorian Adults’ Novel’, Victorian Newsletter, 72 (1987), 28-32 (p. 28).

11 ‘A Gossip on Romance’ and ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ are reprinted in Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories and Portraits (Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1990, 1st ed. 1887), pp. 172-190 and pp. 191-207. On Stevenson’s aesthetics, see Richard Ambrosini, Stevenson: la poetica del romanzo (Bulzoni: Roma, 2001).

12 See Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998).

13 Claudia Nelson, Boys Will Be Girls. The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857-1917 (New Brunswick - London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 128-132. On children’s imperial literature, see also John Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins, 1991).

14 Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. by Denis Butts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 1st ed. 1885), see the dedication.

15 ‘My First Book’, Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), 111-131 (p. 117).

16 Brian Gibson, ‘One Man Is an Island: Natural Landscape Imagery in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island’, Victorian Newsletter, 101 (2002), 12-21 (p. 12). On Treasure Island as a ‘meta-island’, see Margaret Elphinstone, ‘An Island is a Piece of Land Entirely Surrounded by Texts’, Études Écossaises, 9 (2003-2004), 149-161.

17 Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the ‘Fin de Siècle’ (London: Macmillan, 2006), p. 37.

18 Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, with a new introduction by R. H. W. Dillard (New York: Signet Classic, 1998, 1st ed. 1883), p. 76.

19 Linda Stiebel, ‘Imagining Empire’s Margins. Land in Rider Haggard’s African Romances’, in Being/s in Transit. Travelling, Migration, Dislocation, ed. by Liselotte Glage (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 125-140 (p. 134). Cf. also William J. Scheick, ‘Adolescent Pornography and Imperialism in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines’, English Literature in Transition, 34, 1 (1991), 19-30.

Stevenson6.indb 213 23/10/2009 19:25


20 Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the ‘Fin de Siècle’. Popular Fiction and British Culture 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 54.

21 Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins, Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 40.

22 Naomi J. Wood, ‘Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money’, Children’s Literature, 26 (1998), 61-85 (p. 63).

23 Elio Di Piazza, ‘The Quest for Values: Traditional Sources in Two Late Nineteenth-Century Novels of Adventure’, in Metaphors of Economy, ed. by Nicole Bracker, Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam - New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 164-165.

24 Anne McClintock, ‘Maidens, Maps and Mines: The Reinvention of Patriarchy in Colonial South Africa’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 87, 1 (1988), 147-192 (p. 148).

25 Elio Di Piazza, L’avventura bianca. Testo e colonialismo nell’Inghilterra del secondo Ottocento (Bari: Adriatica, 1999), p. 143.

26 Cf. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 37.

27 Diana Loxley, Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 143.

28 Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. A Future Feeling (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 70-71.

29 Richard F. Patteson, ‘Manhood and Misogyny in the Imperialist Romance’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 35, 1 (1981), 3-12.

30 Linda Stiebel, Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard’s African Romances (Westport: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 57-58.

31 Gerald Monsman, H. Rider Haggard and the Imperial Frontier. The Political & Literary Contexts of His African Romances (Greensboro: ELT Press, University of North Carolina, 2006), p. 71.

32 Jeff D. Bass, ‘The Romance as Rhetorical Dissociation: the Purification of Imperialism in King Solomon’s Mines’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 67 (1981), 259-269.

33 Kitzan, Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire. The Rose-Colored Vision, pp. 167-177.

Stevenson6.indb 214 23/10/2009 19:25

215Sara Rizzo

Graphic visions of Dr Jekyll

Sara Rizzo

Alan Grant (script) and Cam Kennedy (art), Robert Louis Stevenson’s

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (New Lanark: Waverley Books,

2008). 40 pp. £6.99. ISBN 9781902407449.

Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: A

Graphic Novel (London: Self Made Hero (Eye Classics), 2009). 121 pp.

£12.99. ISBN 9781906838034.

In 2008 and 2009 two graphic novel adaptations of Jekyll and

Hyde were published in Great Britain, part of the recent explo-

sion of interest in ‘graphic novels’.1

The first graphic novel came out last summer for UNESCO’s

second ‘One Book – One City’ series of events held in Edinburgh,2

created by what was called the Scottish comic-book ‘dream team’:

a scriptwriter for DC’s superhero Batman, Alan Grant, and the

gifted illustrator Cam Kennedy,3 both masters of the comic-book

requiring no further presentation. Their version of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde was actually produced in one version with texts close to

Stevenson’s and three derived versions – in Scots, Gaelic and in

simplified English (‘modern text’) – following the warm recep-

tion of their multiple-version adaptation of Kidnapped the year

before.

The second work reviewed here, published in May 2009, is

by two Anglo-Polish artists: Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia

Schejbal. Klimowski has an international career designing film

and theatre posters, book jackets, illustrations and TV graphics

and animations, plus some recent graphic novels, while Schejbal

is a well-known stage designer, as well as a collaborator with

Klimowski on a praised earlier graphic-novel adaptation of The

Stevenson6.indb 215 23/10/2009 19:25


Master and Margherita (2008). Now they have collaborated

again on this adaptation of Stevenson’s text (the ‘script’) and

then split the artwork: Klimowski takes the first half cover-

ing Utterson’s investigations

while Schejbal takes the second

half chronicling Jekyll’s terrible

discovery.

Though only a year separates

these two versions, their very dif-

ferent approaches are immediately

visible. Grant and Kennedy’s ver-

sion is a full-colour adaptation

with a cover showing two standing

figures: Jekyll conceals his face

while Hyde, behind him, looks into

the reader’s eyes, a disturbing and

also original choice, as it avoids

the cliché laboratory scene, often

with Hyde emerging from the potion.4 Inside, there is no fixed

grid: pages are often divided in three bands of varying width or

with four or five panels (single images) per page, with an almost

constant presence of elements breaking through the frame.

Additional variety is given to the graphic structure by unframed

scenes, usually marking high points in the story (the trampling

scene, the murder of Carew, the first transformation, Jekyll at

the window, and Utterson’s nightmare, distributed in a series of

circles as in the depiction of a nightmare in the same authors’

Kidnapped).5

In contrast, Klimowski and Schejbal’s version is a black-and-

white (or rather, greyscale) version, the cover of which skips the

usual idea of showing human dichotomy to show a close-up of

the lean and shocked face of Jekyll, white-faced and dark-eyed,

reminiscent of the exaggerated expressions of John Barrymore

in Robertson’s 1920 silent film adaptation.6 This choice is even

Stevenson6.indb 216 23/10/2009 19:25

217Sara Rizzo

more unconventional than that of Grant and Kennedy, for the

covers of most other comic-book versions tend to show either

the doctor with his double, or give prominence to a monstrous

Hyde.7 The inner graphic

structure is characterised by

austere pages with only two

or three panels, framed and

rectangular, with very few

examples of figures break-

ing through the frame. This

serves to depict a succession

of single scenes rather than a

flowing sequence,8 with key

moments marked by single-

and double-page panels.

Most of these large panels

occur in the second half of

the story (there are only

two before ‘The Last Night’

episode) and this marks a shift of perspectives from Utterson’s

investigation, illustrated by Klimowski, to Schejbal’s darker,

more ambiguous, naïf style that suits Jekyll’s memories, the

confession of his nocturnal adventures, the discovery of his dark

side and his evil actions.

On the level of narrative structure, the divergence between

these two versions is even more evident. Grant and Kennedy’s

adaptation follows the 10 chapters of the original (like Classics

Illustrated 1953, 1990) as faithfully as possible, and almost all the

words are from Stevenson’s text. This faithfulness to the original

is due in part to the educative aim required by the UNESCO com-

mittee, who wanted to involve young readers, and in part to a

respect for the original author, as Grant, half-joking, confessed

in an interview: ‘With an original story you can just go for it:

there’s no invisible Robert Louis Stevenson looking over your

Stevenson6.indb 217 23/10/2009 19:25


left shoulder saying, ‘You bastard! Don’t touch my work!’’.9 This

decision to remain close to the original text (though some aspects

of Stevenson’s novella do not fit easily in comic-book format, as

Grant admits), keeps this version distinct from the majority of

film versions, which are based on the last the last three chapters

of the original, and also from earlier comic book adaptations

such as Classic Comics 1943,10 which borrows heavily from ver-

sions of the story in older media

(theatre and cinema), as well as

from more recent Italian comic-

book versions by Battaglia, Sclavi

and Mattotti, equally dependent

on the last chapters, but which

also abandon many of the con-

ventions of the stage/Hollywood

tradition to give a freer, more

personal interpretation as a

way of recovering aspects of the

original.

Klimowski and Schejbal have

adopted this last approach,

privileging the suggestive power

of illustrations, using captions

and dialogues that derive from Stevenson’s text without (for the

most part) quoting it directly. At the same time, however, they

keep the structure of mystery by foregrounding enigmatic ele-

ments: Carew carrying a letter addressed to Utterson (p. 28);

the search in vain for Jekyll in the dissection room block (pp.

60-1); the inspection of the study and the mirror (pp. 62-3);

the waking-to-find-himself-Hyde episode (an uneasy half-face

beneath the bedclothes and then the close-up on the hand of

Hyde, p. 101), the sequence of Hyde wandering around London

before meeting Lanyon at midnight to drink the potion (pp. 114-

5) – all of these are actually omitted from the Grant and Kennedy

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219Sara Rizzo

version. Schejbal translates Jekyll’s confession in long sequences

accompanied by sparse texts about Jekyll’s early life, with images

relating to transcendental studies and the realization that man

is really two, and a sequence of him walking across the silent

house to see himself in the mirror as Hyde (pp. 90-3), while

Grant and Kennedy for the same episodes create pages covered

by captions. Here the ‘isolated’

panels more easily suggest an

enigmatic reality than the cap-

tions and constantly changing

page-design and panel-type of

Grant and Kennedy’s version.

This is not to say that Grant

and Kennedy’s version does

not have illustrative solutions

of its own that give back ener-

gy to the translated story and

create visually enigmatic ele-

ments to translate those of the

text. There are some interest-

ing graphic translations of the

narrative, for example, such

as the doubled and mirrored

images of Hyde facing Utterson (p. 10) and of Enfield alongside

Utterson (p. 1-2, 5, 26-7). But one of the most interesting tech-

niques is their use of significant colours. Certain repeated colours

acquire an association with elements of the narrative, like the

bright (almost phosphorescent) yellow for lamps in the dangerous

street (first in pairs, then multiplied, and even associated with the

lamp of the police-station). The colour is then associated with the

light of interiors (thus translating the changing associations of

exterior and interior of Stevenson’s text, when the originally safe

interior becomes dangerous). This ‘semanticised’ yellow (also

associated with the potion, p. 23) is then used to frame characters

Stevenson6.indb 219 23/10/2009 19:25


and associate them as doubles of each other: Utterson, Poole and

Jekyll (though never Hyde).11 Green is associated with the coats

of Jekyll and Hyde and with both potion and poison, suggest-

ing that b o t h

h a v e s a m e

l e t h a l e f f e c t .

G r a n t a n d

Kennedy also use sophisticated coding to indicate the story-in-

the-story sections (narratives of Enfield and Lanyon) by means

of captions boxes of a different colour (light blue in comparison

with light yellow).

Among Klimowski and Schejbal’s graphic translations of the

narrative perhaps the most interesting are the wordless panels.

(This is particularly appropriate to a text where ‘the narrative

involves many phenomena that are ineffable, indescribable, or

unnameable’).12 The buildings behind Hyde as he approaches the

back door (p. 19) and the courtyard of Jekyll’s house (pp. 90-1)

look like starkly contrasted Expressionist backdrops, recalling all

the contrasting symbolic values connected with Jekyll’s house.

And although there’s only one mirror in the original text, in

this graphic novel they appear frequently, underlining the idea

of doubling. Jekyll, surrounded by a halo of sanctity and good-

ness in the film tradition (and to a certain extent in Grant and

Kennedy’s noble, good-looking Jekyll with firm jaw), here regains

all his hypocrisy and middle-class arrogance, while Hyde’s figure

is no more a horror-movie monster but inspires sympathy with

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221Sara Rizzo

his youthful and almost-innocent smile (pp. 92-3); Grant and

Kennedy’s figures, in contrast, are all like massive, muscular

action-men with very few facial expressions.

Another important point in

adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde

is how the conclusion is treated.

The Hollywood tradition cre-

ated a consolatory end with Hyde

turning into the good doctor as he

dies and early American comic-

books followed this; but the freer

Italian sequential-art adaptations

find different and original ways

to celebrate the central silence of

Stevenson’s narrative in their clo-

sures.13 Grant and Kennedy’s ver-

sion finishes with a stoical Jekyll

awaiting the end, with a rather

banal penultimate panel showing a

bottle of green poison (to accompany the caption ‘Will Hyde die

on the scaffold?’) and the last image shows the still-noble and

firm-eyed Jekyll with a wild, teeth-baring Hyde behind and to

the right of him. Klimowski and Schejbal’s ending, in contrast,

presents a blank-eyed screaming face against a dark background,

uttering a silent cry (reminiscent of Munch), and facing this, on

the final page, the handwritten text ending with ‘I bring the life

of the unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end’ followed by two blots.

It is possible to see an artistic analogy here with Mattotti who

ends his version with a series of images of a diminishing and

ever-changing twisted figure, a distorted face finally engulfed by

the dark background and then a desk with sheets, ink-bottle and

pen but no writer. Like the Italian versions, then, Klimowski and

Schejbal’s ending emphasises the central silence of the original

text and at the same time (in the image facing the page of hand-

Stevenson6.indb 221 23/10/2009 19:25


written text) doubles, visually and graphically, Jekyll’s end in an

uncertain and disturbing way.

Grant and Kennedy’s faithful version avoids being a pedantic

literal adaptation, thanks to some interesting enigmatic elements

and to its multi-shaped graphic structure, which allows a dynamic

reading and perhaps suggests hysteria and disorientation, mak-

ing this graphic novel appealing above all to an intended youthful

audience, who will be familiar with this style from action and

super-hero comic-books. Klimowski and Schejbal, though less

famous in the comics world, manage to create an intriguing and

more sophisticated version (at least for Stevenson scholars) with

a peculiar style of naïf drawings mixed with Expressionist art and

large-size panels, many of them unaccompanied by speech or

captions, emphasizing the indeterminate, basically irresolvable

nature of Stevenson’s text.

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223Sara Rizzo

Notes

1 For more on the subject see Giovanni Bruner, ‘Sulla (benefica?) esplosione del graphic novel’ in Annuario del fumetto 14 (2009), pp. 6-8 (in a section with the interesting title ‘Dr. Fumetto & Mr. Graphic Novel’).

2 http://www.cityofliterature.com/ecol.aspx?sec=6&pid=215.

3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ag4yI3Nmrk ‘Jekyll & Hyde: Graphic Novel Launch’, from Scotland on TV.

4 See the Classic Illustrated versions of 1949 and 1953 (Jekyll in the lab and Hyde coming out from potion’s vapours), and the Marvel Classics Comics version of 1976 (Jekyll drinking the potion and doubling faces showing the transformation).

5 Alan Grant (script) and Cam Kennedy (art), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped –The Graphic Novel (New Lanark: Waverley Books, 2006), p 57.

6 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920) directed by John Stuart Robertson with John Barrymore in the title roles. Utterson’s nightmare (pp. 16-7) with Hyde opening the bed curtains, also reminds us of the sequence of the tormented night of Jekyll in Robertson’s film with a terrified Barrymore sitting up in bed trying to resist the approach of a huge spider.

7 See the covers of the versions published in the magazine series Classic Comics (1943), Pendulum Illustrated Stories (1991), and the Italian Dylan Dog (1994), the cover of the ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ number of Graphic Classics (2004), and the graphic novel volume by Mattotti and Kramsky (2002).

8 In a similar way, Dino Battaglia’s version (1974) also condenses the story in ‘single, memorable pictures’.

9 http://www.list.co.uk/article/6362-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-interview-with-alan-grant-and-cam-kennedy/

10 Nevertheless, some elements from Hollywood tradition are retained, like the ‘heroic’ young Jekyll, and the stooping ape-man Hyde with hat, bat-like cloak and stick.

11 Jekyll is associated with the colour on pp. 13 (Jekyll’s face, Hyde’s shadow plus yellow background), 19 (Jekyll’s face, yellow background, twice), 20 (Jekyll surrounded by yellow halo of fire), 35 (a departing Jekyll framed in yellow doorway) and 39 (again near the fire).

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Utterson is associated with the colour on pp.11-13, 21 (in a yellow halo of fire like Jekyll on the facing page), 23, 30. On p. 13 the handshake of Jekyll and Utterson shows the same yellow shining below their hands. Poole is associated with the colour on pp. 11, 23, 29-30.

12 Richard Dury (ed.), The Annotated Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Geonoa: ECIG, 2005), pp. 22-23.

13 See the brilliantly compressed version by Battaglia for the comics magazine Linus (1974), and the full-scale graphic novel by Kramsky-Mattotti (2002), which could be considered as French, since Mattotti lives and works in Paris and this version was first published by the famous bande-dessinée publisher of Casterman). See also the 1994 episode in the Dylan Dog (a series admired by Umberto Eco and now finding some recognition in English-speaking countries).

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225Reviews

Eileen Dunlop, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind (National Museums Scotland: Edinburgh, 2008) with illustrations, bibliography, and index, 160 pp., £8.99. ISBN 978-1-905267-217

Eileen Dunlop’s Robert Louis Stevenson: The Travelling Mind

is a concise history of Stevenson’s life. Not an academic work,

the biography aims instead to tell the story of how Stevenson

lived, who his parents and friends were, and what influenced his

writing. As an introduction to Stevenson studies, The Travelling

Mind is a strong work, offering an evocative account of

Stevenson’s ancestry, his life, and his legacy. It is Dunlop’s evoca-

tion of events, however, which sometimes frustrates the reader,

since she often hints at tantalising aspects to Stevenson’s life and

beliefs (such as his ideas about sexual relationships, class, and

his sense of national identity) while stopping just short of giving

her own interpretation of them. Although offering an insight into

Stevenson’s personality, Dunlop’s reluctance to express her own

views on his life means that some of the richness of this other-

wise lively text is lost.

Dunlop begins her biography with a discussion of Stevenson’s

ancestry, examining in particular the family lighthouse busi-

ness, in which Louis himself would never take an active inter-

est. She writes about Stevenson’s life chronologically, focusing

on the influences on his early childhood like his nurse Alison

Cunningham, ‘Cummy’, and her religious obsessions, his early

relationship with his (also religious) parents, and how his con-

stant illnesses fuelled his imagination and later his writing. She

goes on to discuss how his sporadic attendance at school may

have explained his difficulties in making friendships as a child.

His loneliness and anxieties about his friendships, as well as his

strained relationship with his parents are themes that Dunlop

shows to have marked his entire life. As a teenager, he struggled

with his parents against becoming an engineer and joining the

Stevenson6.indb 225 23/10/2009 19:25


lighthouse business, against making law his career and most

importantly, against their wishes that he abandon his desire to

make a career out of writing. Later, Dunlop shows how he also

struggled with them in his choice of wife, Fanny Osbourne, a

divorced American who was ten years Louis’s senior. She also

explores the turbulent relationship he shared with his friends,

examining in particular his falling out with William Ernest

Henley and his feelings that his friends could not be relied upon

to give him the support that he desired. The Travelling Mind also

concentrates on Stevenson’s lifelong struggle against illness, his

many travels, and the problematic domestic life he shared with

his wife Fanny and her children. Finally, the biography examines

how Stevenson, once out of critical favour, is returning as an

important figure in literature and for Scotland.

Dunlop’s work is at its strongest in its discussions of Stevenson’s

changeable character. She portrays him as mischievous, moody,

lonely, ambitious, and simultaneously hopeful and despairing,

offering anecdotes to give the reader a sense of the man behind

the writing. For example, she describes him as a child ‘run[ning]

‘impishly’ through flowerbeds and then deliberately enlarg[ing]

his small footprints so that an older child could be blamed’ (p.

20). We also get evidence of his vanity, when, for example, he

would storm out of Professor Alexander Fleeming’s house after

Fleeming voiced his disapproval of Louis’s lax attitude to educa-

tion and flippant remarks. Indeed, Dunlop’s characterisation of

the Stevenson family, particularly Louis’s father, Tom, is fasci-

nating. She gives the reader a sense of the triumphs and disap-

pointments of the small family, and their attempts to overcome

old arguments and frustrations (for example Stevenson’s aban-

donment of the Christian faith which his parents found devastat-

ing). Dunlop’s work is also successful in highlighting Stevenson

in the Scottish context, giving the reader a clear picture of life in

Edinburgh during the second half of the nineteenth century.

While Dunlop certainly makes Stevenson, and particularly

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227Reviews

Stevenson in Scotland, come to life, she often stops short of

taking some of her more suggestive observations further. In a

discussion of his introduction to university life, she hesitates to

draw conclusions about Stevenson’s ‘sordid and squalid’ experi-

ences (she hints at sexual relationships and alcoholism) and

neatly sidesteps the issue, arguing ‘what matters less is the effect

of his moral innocence than the enrichment of his imagination’

(pp. 38, 39). She also avoids speculating on Stevenson’s beliefs

about class. Although she does argue that descriptions of the

Scottish University system ‘give[ing] the lie to the proud boast

that Scotland has, or ever had, a classless society’, she is reluctant

to comment on Louis’s own examples of classism (such as his

treatment of Henley), instead calling attention to his ‘good-

humoured appreciation of people of all ranks and conditions’

in his writing (pp. 30, 31). Furthermore, while Dunlop often

discusses Stevenson in relation to his Scottish national identity,

remarking on his longing for ‘a country of the imagination, one

gone for over a century before he was gone, the Scotland of hon-

our and loyalty to chieftain and family’, she avoids discussing in

depth how Stevenson might have felt about this nostalgic iden-

tity while living in Samoa (p. 128). Finally, Dunlop’s intriguing

title, taken from lines Louis wrote in a letter to his friend Sidney

Colvin, is not addressed in the text, and the reader must decide

what Dunlop means by the ‘travelling mind’ and the phrase’s

literal and metaphorical implications.

Although a stronger authorial presence would enrich this

biography, The Travelling Mind is nevertheless a stimulating

text, particularly useful for young scholars and those interested

in learning more about Stevenson. Dunlop’s enthusiasm about

her subject will certainly encourage readers to revisit Stevenson’s

writings, and to investigate further into his life.

Hilary Grimes

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Damian Atkinson, ed., The Letters of William Ernest Henley to Robert Louis Stevenson (High Wycombe, Bucks: Rivendale Press, 2008), 400 pp., £40 / $75. ISBN 1-904201-11-3

There is no best way to present a correspondence, whether of an

author, a philosopher, a scientist, or anyone else, celebrated or

not, who wrote memorable or at least significant letters. A full-

scale collected edition can be invaluable to a dedicated scholar,

despite or even because it must include texts whose significance

does not make them jump off the page, but the sheer bulk of such

a collection makes it costly, difficult to consult, and likely to deter

most lay readers and all but a few publishers. A selection of let-

ters, preferably in one volume, is more readable, and may still

give some idea of the range and variety of a writer’s voices and

obsessions, but the reader is always at the mercy of the selec-

tor and has to be willing to follow several narrative threads at

once. A volume of letters to a single correspondent (or intimate

group of correspondents) cannot give us the entire quiddity of a

writer, but has the virtue of concentration. Damian Atkinson has

already given us The Selected Letters of William Ernest Henley

(Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), which

picks, from the surviving corpus of 2,500, 150 letters, 38 of them

to Stevenson. Bradford and Mehew’s wonderful The Letters

of Robert Louis Stevenson provides an extensive selection of

relevant Henley letters, and some of them reappear in their

Selected Letters. Yet in spite of these and other appearances,

Damian Atkinson’s edition of all surviving letters to Robert Louis

and Fanny Stevenson is amply justified in interest, scope, and

editorial quality.1 The introduction is succinct and helpful, the

annotations are obviously the result of hard archival work, and

the look of the volume is congenial.2

Like ‘collected’, ‘surviving’ is an unstable term. The instabil-

ity is twofold. New letters may surface after an edition has gone

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229Reviews

to press, rendering any claim to comprehensiveness unwise.

Surviving letters, moreover, may not be the most extraordinary

ones. Documents are subject to fire, flood, and the improvisa-

tional energies of such practical people as Warburton’s cook and

John Stuart Mill’s maid. The most provocative letters are the

most likely to be thrown away by their recipients, their heirs, or

executors. Fanny Stevenson destroyed some letters because they

were ‘too personal and intimate’.3 Others are fragmentary; the

letter on p. 165, for example, begins in mid sentence, and consists

of the last two of 34 pages.4 We may be missing something par-

ticularly outrageous, therefore, but can’t be sure of it. What we

do have holds all kinds of fascinations.

Until Mr Atkinson started his work on the Henley correspond-

ence, the main interest for biographers, critics, and literary his-

torians has been the quarrel. The Selected Letters include several

items relevant to this sad affair, and the rest may be found in

the sixth volume of Bradford and Mehew. Given the nature of

the project, it was inevitable that they also had to be included

in the present volume. When read in this context, and in this

sequence, however, they appear in a different perspective. Now

they are only part of a much longer story, and in some ways less

important in terms of Stevenson’s life than earlier letters, but

this broader perspective also makes them more moving.

On 12 November 1884, Henley wrote to Stevenson announcing

the imminent arrival of a birthday present, an expensive set of

Molière, bought with the encouragement of Anna Henley and

probably far more generous than they could afford. The second

paragraph begins:

Next February, or January, we shall have been friends for

ten years…. Ten years, dear boy, & all that in them is! – In

ten years from now, I hope we shall have done a few good

plays, & you’ll be seeing your way to that new & true life of

John Silver which of course it will be yours & nobody else’s

Stevenson6.indb 229 23/10/2009 19:25


to write. You are a high-nosed classic, sipping your wine

(good wine!) & talking Molière to me, a disemboweled

romantic; it may be in that very house which we are going

to build on the site of the old semaphore station you wot

of with the Mediterranean at our feet, & the Estourelles a

bow shot off. What think you of that for 1894! I see it very

plainly; & I believe. (p. 268)

For all his deeply needed stoicism, Henley was indeed a

romantic, dreaming among the pea-soup fogs of Shepherd Bush

(a not particularly glamorous suburb in West London) of life in

the southern sun, its conviviality funded by a series of theatrical

hits. In fact the friends fell out in the spring of 1888, and long

before 1894, the year of Stevenson’s death, they were divided

by what the old song calls ‘a waste of seas’. Stevenson, whose

literary temperament was mercurial and inventive, had broken

away from writing plays and boys’ books. In the last extant letter,

however, written on 22 May 1894, Henley is still talking about

Macaire, and although he passes on Kipling’s ‘golden words’

about The Ebb-Tide, ‘the thing you published in To-Day’, he has

nothing to say about it on his own account. In his Pacific island

stories, Stevenson was anything but the ‘Shorter Catechist of

Vailima’ of Henley’s imagining.

Among the revisions to the standard narrative prompted by this

edition, we find that Katherine de Mattos’s writing had already

caught Henley’s attention well before the letter about Fanny’s

supposed plagiarism of her story became the immediate cause

of the quarrel (20 January, 2 July 1886, pp. 312, 320). Again,

some of the letters to Fanny are warmer than the assumption

that Henley was simply jealous of her might lead one to expect,

and even the references in letters to her husband take delight in

her fits of passion.5 In the allusion above to ‘the house which we

are going to build?’ the identity of the ‘we’ remains a puzzle – a

bachelor retreat or a refuge for both couples? As Jenni Calder

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231Reviews

observes, with characteristic insight, ‘it is clear that Henley was,

in a sense, in love’ with his friend,6 but some elements of the cor-

respondence suggest that Henley’s real anguish was not so much

over jealousy of Fanny as over what he feared was Stevenson’s

inconstancy. Reproaches about absence and unanswered letters

echo through the correspondence. In its tone of aggrieved jocu-

larity, this passage from 19 September 1882 is typical:

Then, I consider it scandalous of you not to have taken

Margate on your way to Dover, or – failing that – to have

bidden me up to town for the night. This, as you’re away

for the winter, and we shall meet no more on this side of

’83. Which I think beastly….

However, you always were a dam heggoist; & a dam heg-

goist you always will be. Voilà! (p. 172)

The anxiety about change extends, too, to Stevenson’s artistic

development. Henley, for example, deplored the shift in mode

and tone from Travels with a Donkey to The Amateur Emigrant:

‘I could have done the Emigrant; I couldn’t the Donkey, not to

be made a postmaster. The one’s art, the other’s journalism.’ (p.

123) It is striking that Henley, who was so original in his own

early poems, notably the ‘In Hospital’ sequence, who would rath-

er have written Leaves of Grass than Ruskin’s Modern Painters

or ‘the moral works of T. Carlyle’ (p. 102), and who, as an edi-

tor, would later nurture such diverse talents as Kipling, Yeats,

Conrad, and Wells, should be so inclined to curb Stevenson’s

urge to make things new.

We underestimate the importance of this friendship to both

men, though, if we concentrate on Henley’s obsession with

preserving the status quo ante. The two of them were capable of

great generosity to each other, as with Stevenson’s gifts of books,

money, and tobacco, or Henley’s tireless concern for Stevenson’s

health or his equally tireless efforts to promote his friend’s work

Stevenson6.indb 231 23/10/2009 19:25


and find just the right editor or illustrator, or subject for an

essay.7 They endured a great deal of physical suffering, yet for

long stretches, especially if we read through this edition with the

appropriate letters in Bradford and Mehew to hand, they make

an impression of sheer energy and will-power.

Nevertheless, since Stevenson is the better-known figure, the

peculiar interest of Mr Atkinson’s collection is the opportunity

to see and hear Henley in full flood, without the mediation of

biographers.8 Gossip, literary politics, imprecations, jokes and

judgements sweep by amidst the verbal torrent. Here is just a

sample from a letter of 3 July 1882. It refers to John Morley,

then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, a man of letters and (no

doubt to Henley’s disgust, a Liberal politician), introduced in the

preceding paragraph as ‘that preposterous Shitehouse Morley’,

the historian A. W. Ward, Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse (usually

called, with a jab at his homosexuality and his talents as a social

climber, ‘Becky’, as in Becky Sharp), and Alfred Egmont Hake,

editor of the Overland Mail.

Talking of Morley, I had a rare rap at his fancy man, Ward,

& his fancy man’s monograph on Charles Dickens. I rather

think, my Louis, that I butchered that poor old dummy in

good style & with good discretion & judgement. Man, but

I enjoyed it! The Lord delivered him into my hand. Every

page was addled. The only difficulty was, what to choose?

The heart of Becky rejoiced within him when he read, &

Colvin wept on my neck after reading, & Hake reprinted

two thirds of the butchery. When I think what I could

have done with that book, had not Morley been the Patent

Digester he is, I feel sorry that the butchery wasn’t real,

and that I’m not writing this from the Condemned Cell in

Newgate – for a double murder of the Celebrated Editor

& his not less illustrious but – not quite-so-intellectual

contributor. (p. 168).

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233Reviews

In the following paragraph, Henley weighs into Wagner and

all those in England who favour German art at the expense of

French. We have very good reason to thank Mr Atkinson’s anno-

tations for keeping us up to date on the dramatis personae of this

savage pageant.

At times, making his way through all this literary swashbuck-

ling must have exhausted Stevenson, even before facing the chal-

lenge of a fit reply. Henley could be cruel, but he never lacked

conviction. He took the self-esteem of the aesthetes as a personal

insult, and famously despised gentility. His sense of decorum

was that of the sixteenth rather than the nineteenth century, he

was a considerable authority on eighteenth century thieves’ cant,

and his letters are a trove of late Victorian slang. In addition, he

read voraciously, feverishly, and became one of the few English

champions of Japanese graphics and Impressionist painting. In

other words, in that first decade of friendship, his company, in

ink or in the flesh, must have exhilarated Stevenson, who thrived

on everything indecorous.

Between them, certain other bonds, and other tensions stayed

unspoken. Henley never expresses envy of Stevenson – only an

occasional wistfulness, and Stevenson never condescends, but

their existence in the world, bohemian society excepted, was

marked by social distance. Health aside, the world was more dif-

ficult, even perilous, for Henley. An occasional shortage of funds

notwithstanding, Stevenson could afford to travel, and Henley

could not. Worse, he lacked connections. Early in the friendship,

he observed: ‘I am so far away from the world of journalism that

I cannot keep myself in people’s minds.’ (p. 75) Stevenson had

an extensive network of family members and family friends who

could be relied on for encouragement and support. Henley had

three brothers in modest circumstances and a theatrical fourth

whose erratic behaviour became a public nuisance. He had had

the good fortune to be taught at the Crypt Grammar School by

one of the great Victorian dominies, the poet T. E. Brown, but

Stevenson6.indb 233 23/10/2009 19:25


if Gloucester lacked the sternness of Edinburgh it also lacked

the intellectual ferment. In his early London years, Henley read

and read not only because he loved books, but because, in order

to make some sort of living, he had to review them. In terms of

survival, he sometimes lived like a character in Gissing – and

with a much loved wife and daughter to support. In these circum-

stances, it is noteworthy that Henley gladly acted as Stevenson’s

unpaid but indefatigable agent.9 The very insistence on writing

more plays (even operas) that became so tiresome for Stevenson

was essentially a dream of making lots of money (pp. 263, 275).

Although the friendship was to wear out, it was for a while a

triumph of affinity over difference. The ninth poem in Henley’s

vivid and often wrenching sequence ‘In Hospital’ is titled ‘Lady

Probationer’. The quiet demeanour of this trainee nurse, a late

vocation, is gentle and genteel. The poet becomes ‘Absorbed in

her, as in a pleasant mystery’, concluding with the line ‘Somehow,

I rather think she has a history.’ So did Stevenson and Henley.

Laurence Davies

Notes

1 For a list of other appearances of Henley letters, see Atkinson’s Introduction, p. 11. This edition also includes several revealing letters to Charles Baxter, written at moments of crisis.

2 To cite the few editorial problems in the body of the review would be out of proportion to this edition’s general merits. It would have been worthwhile to justify each conjectural dating (e.g. pp. 216, 303) in a footnote. There are some misprints that look like compositorial rather than editorial flaws, for example, ‘Erocia’ on p.128 and ‘Soma’ on p. 343 – and Samoa is not just one island. On p. 133, l. 7, perhaps ‘moidores’ would be a better reading than ‘mandores’? Occasionally, a note should be longer. For example, the gloss on Lyonesse (p. 97, n. 119), might also mention its association with the story of Tristan and Iseult; and on page 185, note 293 might refer to Morley’s connection with ‘the bloody Radicals’ as well as his editorship of the English Men of Letters series. For one other minor lack, see n. 4.

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235Reviews

3 Letter to Anna Henley, Atkinson, p. 11.

4 There is no editorial comment on these gaps. Are we to take it that they are Fanny’s work, and did Henley number all his pages?

5 See, for instance, the letter to Fanny of 12 December 1885, praising her courage, and describing Henley’s efforts to place her story ‘The Shadow on the Bed’ (p. 310). Writing to Louis, she is often called the ‘Simoom’ (a hot desert wind), or ‘the Bedlamitish Woman’, or ‘the Wild Woman’ (pp. 210, 244, 252); it is tempting to claim that Henley saw in her something of his own blustery spirit, if only as an unconscious projection.

6 RLS: A Life Study (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), p. 95.

7 For instance, Henley was determined that A Child’s Garden should have the finest illustrations possible – preferably by Caldecott, or Greenaway, or Walter Crane (pp. 144, 269. Again, Henley seems to have come up with the idea for ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (p. 146). For Henley’s solicitude for the well-being of Stevenson’s parents, as well as for RLS himself, see the letter to Charles Baxter of [?16 May 1884], p. 235.

8 This is not to disparage the work of John Connell or Jerome Hamilton Buckley (whose analysis of Henley as a ‘counter-decadent’ has kept its vigour), or Ernest Mehew’s fine entry in the new DNB. These biographers offer a different sort of experience.

9 Witness his activities on behalf of A Child’s Garden (p. 275).

Stevenson6.indb 235 23/10/2009 19:25


Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. Writers of Transition, ed. by Linda Dryden, Stephen Arata and Eric Massie (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009), 288 pp., $55.00. ISBN 978-0-89672-653-6

Stevenson’s work crosses both geographical and generic borders,

and indeed this was the theme of the ‘Writer of Boundaries’

collection of critical essays edited by Ambrosini and Dury in

2006. Conrad, too, can be said to challenge categories, not least

as writer of what might be called adventure stories with equal

claims to be seen as a proto-modernist. A moment’s comparison

with Kipling or Rider Haggard will show how much further these

two authors took their work from genre fiction to the explora-

tion of the psychological and moral complexities of modernity.

And yet Stevenson has not always been given as much credit in

this context as the author of Heart of Darkness, nor should his

standing depend solely on that late masterwork The Ebb-Tide.

The essays in this valuable volume take up these issues by tracing

links between the two authors and their mutual status as ‘writers

of transition’, in order to rethink how they have been perceived

in the past, and in fact to re-examine the whole question of how

critical paradigms can guide and misguide us at the same time.

In this respect alone, this volume of essays has a contribution to

make over and above the many valuable things its writers have

to say about Stevenson and Conrad along the way. It also has a

substantial bibliography and an effective index.

Linda Dryden’s introduction sees both Conrad and Stevenson

as ‘itinerants and exiles’ and notes that early reviews of Conrad

drew comparisons with the Scot – seven years his senior – even

as Conrad wanted to distance himself from a man he took to be

rather too ‘superliterary, a conscious virtuoso of style’ (p. 4). This

latter was, of course, a critical misapprehension of Stevenson

(albeit based on his own dandyish pronouncements) that was to

Stevenson6.indb 236 23/10/2009 19:25

237Reviews

be sustained well into the twentieth century. In fact one of the

main virtues of this excellent volume is that it consistently chal-

lenges critical categories and previous judgements, to throw new

light on the nature of what we take ‘modern’ writing to be, as it

emerges from those other rather too porous categories the ‘fin de

siècle’ and the late nineteenth century.

Part One of the collection deals with the concept of writers and

more especially of writing in transition. Richard Ambrosini’s

essay sets the context by tracing the critical reception of the two

authors and the pitfalls of an old-style periodisation that refused

to see the modernity of Stevenson while being equally blind to

Conrad’s ambition to reconcile his art with a wide readership.

To this end Conrad drew on the popular appetite for exotic tales

in the 1890s and then on the vogue for spy stories in the 1900s,

and in doing this he was in fact ‘developing prototypes’ already

created by Stevenson. Ambrosini argues that even Frederic

Jameson, who identified a ‘fault-line’ in Conrad between ‘high’

and ‘low’ art (‘“floating uncertainly between Proust and Robert

Louis Stevenson”’ (p. 20), could not quite reconcile himself to

a marriage between the two in either writer. In the same vein,

Ambrosini points to the still burgeoning critical impact of

Conrad’s complex engagement with colonialism and the English

subject (by way of Marlow, for example, that shadiest of narra-

tors) but goes on to argue that this status is usefully challenged

and clarified if it is compared to the more immediate and anthro-

pologically formulated accounts of Stevenson’s non-fictional In

the South Seas, too long forgotten in previous accounts of the

literature of the time. Eric Massie also reflects on the complex

fault line between the critical paradigms of what have come to be

seen as ‘nineteenth century’ and ‘modernist’ writing, not to men-

tion the misreadings of Stevenson as an ‘English’ author by John

McClure or as a writer of ‘adventure’ fiction by Cedric Watts.

Massie goes on to reflect on Conrad and Stevenson’s equally

complex national and cultural situatedness as both ‘insiders’

Stevenson6.indb 237 23/10/2009 19:25


and ‘outsiders’ in British imperial society, with special reference

to what they had to say about that society in The Ebb-Tide and

Victory.

Nathalie Jaëck’s witty and theoretically grounded essay on the

symbolic resonances of the sea for both Conrad and Stevenson’s

fiction goes further. She makes a case for the sea as a Barthean

place of transit, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘indeterminacy’, ‘an open

blank space ordered by no paradigm’ (p. 40), which is a ‘natural

metaphor’ for their own literary position ‘between realism and

modernism’. She sees this as equally evident in the fragmented,

unfinished or transitory nature of the many texts that inhabit

their own texts, as in Kurtz’s journal, or Jekyll’s repressed manu-

script, or Captain Flint’s logbook, or Mackellar’s memoirs or the

French lieutenant’s testimony in Lord Jim, or Marlow’s shad-

owy oral narratives. This goes beyond simply destabilising the

reliable or omniscient nineteenth century narrator / narrative.

Indeed it signals a new conception of the nature of writing itself

whereby these ‘inner doubles’ (p. 48) ‘board’ the main text to call

the whole literary project into question, much more in keeping

with how the French post-structuralists came to view the limi-

nal and elusive nature of writing and textuality. Jaëck cites the

description of a chart in Lord Jim as a metaphor for this insight:

‘The sheet of paper portraying the depths of the sea presented a

shiny surface under the light of a bull’s-eye lamp lashed to a stan-

chion, a surface as level and smooth as the glimmering surface of

the water’ (p. 44). Seen in this light, level, smooth, totally open

(and no doubt inscribed with arcane signs), the chart, or rather

how Conrad describes it here, becomes for Jaëck a striking trope

for the blank and superficial surface of literary realism and the

nature of writing itself. In one of a number of happy links across

topics that this volume offers, Robbie Goh, in Part Two of the

collection explores the more literal role of the sea as a liminal

place in the writings of Conrad and Stevenson, both of whom

were much more alert than their contemporaries to what we

Stevenson6.indb 238 23/10/2009 19:26

239Reviews

would now see as the geopolitical implications of this far-flung

and unstable locus.

Laurence Davies closes the ‘transitionary’ theme of Part One

with an essay on the doubling of the social self in Stevenson and

Conrad, reflecting on the taxonomy of ‘the double’ and tracing

the appearance of doubling and reversal (not always necessar-

ily ‘Gothic’ or transcendental) in the writing of Mark Twain,

Dickens, Wilde and James. Davies recognises the multiple,

protean and modern dimension to duality in such writing, far

beyond any simplistic Manichaeism, but he argues, too, for a

complex socio-political dimension to these uncanny tales, and

for seeing them, not least in ‘The Secret Sharer’, but also even

in Jekyll and Hyde, as a kind of bonding and collusion with the

unspeakable whereby ‘the hairline fractures of society multiply’

(p. 64) to generate a new kind of Gothic materialism and a spe-

cies of existential nausea before its time.

Part Two of the collection takes ‘writing the Empire’ as its

theme, starting with Jekyll and Hyde again, as Andrea White

compares it to Conrad’s ‘A Smile of Fortune’, and reflects on how

the fractured human subject is replicated in, and an inescap-

able part of the great metropolitan centres, home to material

acquisitiveness and the alienation of our hidden selves, haunted

by repressed difference and the repressed ‘others’ of imperial

conquest. Monica Bungaro compares the different ways in which

Stevenson and Conrad write about the cross cultural encounters

between ‘civilisation’ and the colonised other. Homi Bhabha’s

concepts of mimicry and hybridity are brought to bear on what

the two authors find. They each recognise the essential hypocrisy

of the imperial project, and neither is prone to idealise the native,

but Bungaro notes that Stevenson in particular engages with

South Sea culture (in both his fiction and his essays) seeking to

understand it by way of his own Scottish identity, thus reversing

an ‘unequal relationship’. Conrad, on the other hand, withdraws

from the encounter, objectifying the African other as that heart

Stevenson6.indb 239 23/10/2009 19:26


of darkness, as something finally unknowable. And yet Conrad’s

case has its integrity, too, in that he refuses what Robert Young

called the ontological imperialism of presuming to know the Other

by ‘“appropriating and sublating the Other within itself”’(p. 97).

And what may finally be revealed in these imperial encounters is

European civilisation’s fear of itself and of the ‘other’ within – the

source, no less, of Conrad and Stevenson’s greatest insights. Ann

C. Colley continues the theme of such encounters by tracing the

references to cannibalism in Stevenson and Conrad. This offers

a useful case study of Western culture’s morbid fascination with

that particular taboo, and how native cultures have in their turn

exploited or confected tales to feed that fascination. Colley goes

on to suggest a significant difference between our two authors

in the end, for Stevenson remains irreducibly disturbed by the

literal proximity of such practices in the near past of his Samoan

home, while Conrad’s response is to promote (or sideline?) the

concept into the much more symbolic realm of an encompass-

ing ‘darkness’ that reaches from the Thames at night to Kurtz’s

voracious appetite for domination. Robert Hampson closes the

‘imperial’ section of the volume with a series of striking connec-

tions between Treasure Island and Conrad’s Victory, which is

seen as a ‘counterversion’ of Stevenson’s romance (p. 149). Yet

Hampson’s analysis shows that both books can be seen to deal

with and problematise questions of class, authority, legitimacy

and sexuality, this preparing the way for Part Three of the collec-

tion, on ‘social and psychological contexts’.

Deaglán Ó’Donhaile opens Part Three with an essay on ‘the

imagination of urban chaos’. This takes us, not surprisingly to

The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent, but these works are set in

the context of the Clan na Gael bombings that terrorised Britain

in the cause of Irish separatism between 1883 and 1885, giving

rise to a spate of popular ‘dynamite’ novels and stories. In fact

The Dynamiter was conceived as just such a penny dreadful,

reminiscent of the genesis of Jekyll and Hyde, which was soon

Stevenson6.indb 240 23/10/2009 19:26

241Reviews

to follow. Starting with this social context Ó’Donhaile’s fascinat-

ing essay theorises the aesthetics of terrorism via Guy De Bord’s

Society of the Spectacle in a setting of ultimate modernity which

is to say a dark metropolis ‘overflowing with secrets, affections,

and private despairs’ (p. 165). With its insights into the popular

undergrowth of bomb fiction this essay takes us back to the cru-

cially ‘transitional’ nature of Conrad’s and Stevenson’s writing as

it moves into modernism from a grounding in popular fiction.

Martin Danahay’s essay also deals with the city as an index of

modernity, via the theme of the double. Stevenson’s ‘Markheim’

describes an alienating urban environment while Conrad’s ‘The

Secret Sharer’ has moved from ‘the city to the sea’ to portray a lit-

tle universe of its own, in which some sort of communion with the

self is made possible, like ‘“the perfect communion of a seaman

with his first command”’ (p. 186). Isolation is the theme in both

texts, even if Stevenson returns his protagonist to conscience

and community judgment in the end, with a strong admixture

of social and religious feeling. Danahay identifies a fundamental

difference here, even in the Conrad novels that also deal with the

city. Stevenson’s tendency is to see ‘the urban environment as a

network of social bonds that are threatened by antisocial forces,

but [. . .] resilient’. Whereas for Conrad ‘the city is populated by

atomistic individuals’ (p. 188), who are alone just as any skipper

is alone at sea, both physically and psychologically, with only

himself to rely on. The city is also the key to Jane Rago’s essay on

symbolic geography in Conrad and Stevenson as she traces the

then contemporary discourses about race and degeneration, evo-

lution and national identity and their application to The Suicide

Club and Heart of Darkness to recognise that Marlow’s ‘blank

spaces’ and ‘dark places’ may indeed be ‘everywhere’ (p. 207).

Those ‘blank spaces’ are traced again, according to the maps

of both Freud and Jung in Nancy Bunge’s analysis of how evil is

portrayed and understood in Heart of Darkness and Jekyll and

Hyde, and her essay also takes us back to the opening essays on

Stevenson6.indb 241 23/10/2009 19:26


what it is to be a writer. Conrad may see the authorial impulse

(like Freud) as ‘fundamentally narcissistic’ (p. 215), whereas

Stevenson’s unconscious (the ‘Brownies’ of ‘A Chapter on

Dreams’) leads him ‘into a moral dimension totally incompatible

with Freud’s amoral stance but entirely consistent with Jung’s

notion that the unconscious can help human beings discover

absolute values’ (p. 216). Yet Bunge recognises that the novelists

always understood that their works were shaped, in the end, ‘by

their respective temperaments and expereinces’, and she closes

by noting that ‘Jung and Freud would probably have profited

from a touch of the same humility’ (p. 221).

Beyond the uncanny and beyond the ripples of the uncon-

scious, there may yet be something that ‘lies without’, and

Stephen Donovan’s entertaining last essay in the collection

discusses these aspects in the fiction of Stevenson and Conrad

with regard to the vogue for spiritualism that was so prevalent

in their time. Conrad had absolutely no truck with such things

and saw ‘ghost stories and superstitions’ as ‘a facile and debased

mode of representation’ (p. 231), whereas Stevenson’s fascina-

tion with the supernatural (and not just in metaphorical terms) is

clearly evident in his own work. Conrad continued his opposition

to all such matters in the Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line,

and yet Donovan points out that his account of his own creative

experience (in a letter to Ted Sanderson) is suffused with spectral

imagery describing a ‘strange state’ in a ‘land of mist peopled by

shadows’ (p. 233). The final paradox may be that while Conrad’s

fiction sought to ‘“render the highest kind of justice to the visible

universe’”, his own prose, like Stevenson’s, continues to haunt us

from beyond the grave.

Roderick Watson

Stevenson6.indb 242 23/10/2009 19:26

243Contributors

Contributors

Hilary J. Beattie is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in

private practice in New York City, and is on the faculty of the

Columbia University Department of Psychiatry as well as the

Columbia Psychoanalytic Centre. Her research interests are

in psychoanalytic approaches to literature and the Scottish

contribution to psychoanalysis. Her publications include four

papers on Stevenson: �A Fairbairnian Analysis of Robert Louis

Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’; ‘Father

and Son: The Origins of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’;

‘Dreaming, Doubling and Gender in the Work of Robert Louis

Stevenson: The Strange Case of “Olalla”’; and ‘“The interest of

the attraction exercised by the great RLS of those days”: Robert

Louis Stevenson, Henry James and the influence of friendship’.

Nicoletta Brazzelli, now attending a PhD course in English

culture at the University of Milan, is mainly interested in travel

writing and in the interaction between geography and literature.

She has published a volume on Mary Kingsley and essays on the

nineteenth-century literary debate on romance, imperial chil-

dren’s literature, Henry Morton Stanley, Robert Falcon Scott.

Her current work focuses on the representation of colonial and

postcolonial spaces in maps, fiction and travel writing.

Andrew De Young lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where

he recently received his Master’s degree in English from the

University of St. Thomas. He wrote his thesis on Victorian

detective fiction, and has presented papers on the same topic

at the Victorian Home Symposium and the biennial Stevenson

Conference. He has published work in Pro Rege and Writing in

the Margins.

Gordon Hirsch is professor of English at the University of

Minnesota. He is co-editor of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One

Hundred Years (1988) and is currently writing about the col-

Stevenson6.indb 243 23/10/2009 19:26


laboration between Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne.

He is also reading cognitive neuroscience and considering its

applications to the study of nineteenth-century literature, one

example of which is his essay in this volume of JSS.

Nathalie Jaëck is a senior lecturer at Bordeaux University,

France, specializing in late nineteenth-century fiction and the

adventure novel. After a PhD on Arthur Conan Doyle and the

Sherlock Holmes Stories, she has published several articles on

Doyle, Stevenson, Dickens, and Conrad, as well as two books:

Charles Dickens. L’écriture comme pouvoir, l’écriture comme

résistance (2008) and Les Aventures de Sherlock Holmes: une

affaire d’identité (2008).

Matthew Kaiser is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard

University, where he teaches courses in Victorian literature and

gender and sexuality studies. His essays have appeared in a vari-

ety of collections and journals, including New Literary History,

ELH, and Victorian Literature and Culture. The editor of the

two-volume Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and

Culture (2009-10), he is completing two books: The World in

Play: A Portrait of a Victorian Concept and Feeling Historical:

A Poetics of Sensation.

Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega was born in Senegal and has spent

most of her life in Africa, France and the Pacific islands. She got

her agrégation in English in 1987. Since 1999, she has been a

tenured lecturer in English at the University of French Polynesia,

Tahiti, which has earned her some insight into Pacific culture.

Her PhD dissertation at Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle (2008),

proposes a literary and anthropological approach to Robert

Louis Stevenson’s South Sea tales.

Rosella Mallardi is Associate professor of English Language

and Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and

Literatures of the University of Bari. Her research interests

range from Elizabethan and Victorian literature to translation

Stevenson6.indb 244 23/10/2009 19:26

245Contributors

theory. She has published monographs: Il nuovo ‘romance’ di

R. L. Stevenson (1996) and Lewis Carroll, scrittore-fotografo

vittoriano, le voci del profondo e l’‘inconscio ottico’ (2001). She

is currently investigating the influences of photography on litera-

ture and culture in Europe and America during the 19th century,

and the significance of the English translations of Manzoni’s I

promessi sposi in the English and American contexts.

Burkhard Niederhoff is Professor of English Literature at

the University of Bochum (Germany). He is the author of two

books, Erzähler und Perspektive bei Robert Louis Stevenson

(1994), a revised version of his PhD thesis, and ‘The Rule

of Contrary’: Das Paradox in der englischen Komödie der

Restaurationszeit und des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (2001).

In addition, he has published articles on the modernist novel

and narrative theory, on various aspects of the long eighteenth

century, and on contemporary Canadian Literature. He is also

co-editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate.

Laavanyan Ratnapalan teaches history at Goldsmiths

College, London. He researches on the history of anthropology

and psychiatry and is currently working on a study of Viktor von

Weizsäcker. He has written and published works on Stevenson,

E. B. Tylor, and Erwin M. Straus.

Sara Rizzo recently received an MA level ‘laurea’ at Milan

State University with a thesis on comic-book versions of Dr

Jekyll and Mr Hyde and gave a paper based on this at the 2008

RLS conference in Bergamo on which is based a chapter in the

forthcoming European Stevenson volume to be published by

Cambridge Scholars. She is a strong believer in the artistic poten-

tialities of the comic-book/graphic-novel medium as well as

being interested in the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Tania Zulli is a Lecturer at the University of Roma Tre, Italy.

Her present studies concern nineteenth-century colonial litera-

ture and the post-colonial novel. She has published extensively on

Stevenson6.indb 245 23/10/2009 19:26


nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, and she is the author

of a monograph on Nadine Gordimer. She is currently working

on a study of colonial fiction in the late Victorian Age. She is part

of the Editorial Team of Merope, the journal of the Dipartimento

di Scienze Linguistiche e Letterarie of Pescara University.

Stevenson6.indb 246 23/10/2009 19:26

247JSS Notes

Locating Stevenson6th biennial Stevenson conference Stirling University 8-10 July 2010

You may go all over the

States, and … you shall

scarce meet with so marked

a difference of accent as

in the forty miles between

Edinburgh and Glasgow …

local custom and prejudice,

even local religion and local

law, linger on into the latter

end of the nineteenth cen-

tury – imperia in imperio,

foreign things at home.—

RLS, ‘The Foreigner at Home’

The sixth biennial Stevenson conference will be held from

8-10 July 2010 at the University of Stirling (scene of the first

conference in 2000). This return to a Scottish starting-point may

invite attention to origins and locality, but the restless motion

of Stevenson’s writing exerts a different pressure. Our confer-

ence theme of ‘Locating Stevenson’ is concerned with charting

this motion rather than fixing Stevenson’s co-ordinates; with

orientating, rather than merely positioning, his work within the

fields of literary genre, period, movement and genealogy, for

example, and within debates about nation, tradition, place and

identity. This shift from the map to the compass seems suited to

Stevenson6.indb 247 23/10/2009 19:26


the mobility of Stevenson’s own writing and life.

Viewed from another angle, the trope of ‘location’ recalls us

to Stevenson’s own attention, as a critic, to the specificity of

the reading scene. How does the reader or critic’s own located-

ness (historical, cultural, rhetorical, theoretical), condition

Stevenson?

We welcome papers responding to the theme of location in

as wide a sense as possible. For example, Stevenson might be

‘located’ culturally, politically, stylistically, linguistically, and

geographically, as well as with regard to period and or genre.

Equally interesting is Stevenson’s orientation with regard to

Scottish literature, or to American writing; to late Victorians/

belle-lettrism or to modernism; to colonial/anti-colonial dis-

course, or to the debates about realism, literary aesthetics, popu-

lar culture, or writing as a profession.

Further details on plenary speakers, a call for papers, the con-

ference fee, and the social programme are posted on the Stirling

website at www.rls2010.stir.ac.uk

Dr Scott Hames [email protected]

tel: +44(0)1786 466205

Dr Adrian Hunter [email protected]

tel:+44(0)1786 467507

Stevenson6.indb 248 23/10/2009 19:26

249JSS Notes

The New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

General Editors: Stephen Arata, Richard Dury, Penny Fielding and Anthony Mandal (electronic editor)

Latest News

After the publication of five volumes of The Centenary Edition

of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh University

Press decided that the time was right for a parallel print and

electronic edition and that the most satisfactory solution would

be to abandon the Centenary Edition and to start anew with the

New Edinburgh Edition.

One important difference with the Centenary Edition is the

decision to use as base-text the most authoritative early edition—

from the period, that is, when the author worked with greatest

concentration and effort and was still involved in the process of

creation. In contrast, the Centenary Edition’s policy statement

had opted for ‘final intentions’. The important variations between

early and later versions will still be presented in a clear way so

that readers will get a good idea of the evolution of the text over

time. In addition, policy in the choice of copy-text will be flexible

and will to some extent be influenced by what is discovered from

the collation of variants and of course by what is known about

the transmission of the text from author to publisher and printer.

This important decision will be made after consultations between

the volume editor, general editors and the editorial board.

The new edition is planned to extend to 38 volumes and associ-

ated electronic resources. The texts will be prepared by scanning

of the potentially interesting lifetime editions, double-conversion

to readable text (using two different conversion programs),

Stevenson6.indb 249 23/10/2009 19:26


sight-proofing of the copy-text and then collating them all using

an electronic collation program. It is hoped that the scanning can

be undertaken partly in collaboration with institutions such as

the National Library of Scotland and the University of Virginia

Library.

The physical centre of the Edition is the University of

Edinburgh, where it is planned to have an office with dedicated

computer and to employ a research assistant, but the University

of Virginia could well have a satellite centre in the future too.

Electronic publication will be in two parts: an Archive of the

plain text transcriptions to be deposited in a national Scottish

institution (and this archive will be the source of all the texts used

in collation), and Electronic Resources based on a site at EUP or

the University of Edinburgh. The Electronic Resources for each

volume will be divided into Basic and Additional Resources. The

former (to be published contemporaneously with the respective

printed volume) will include (i) the full collation of variant read-

ings, (ii) diplomatic manuscript transcriptions, (iii) additional

notes and corrections. The Additional Resources will include (i)

elaboration of text presentation (hypertext presentation to show

the development of the text, for example), (ii) images and illustra-

tions, (iii) auxiliary texts (e.g. reviews) that have been acquired

by the volume editor. As the Additional Resources are a compli-

cated project on their own they will be concentrated on the texts

that will most benefit for this additional presentation. Anthony

Mandal will be starting with a series of small pilot projects in the

next year or two before moving on to a major work.

With the full collation available in the Basic Resources of the

electronic publishing, this will not be included in the print edi-

tion, which will contain only the list of emendations. Any manu-

script transcriptions in the volumes will also probably ‘reading

versions’ with interesting cancellations in the notes, since the

diplomatic transcription will be available on-line.

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251JSS Notes

Introductions and Textual essays will provide a useful source

of information concerning the composition, production and

early reception of the texts in each volume and the Explanatory

Notes will identify quotations, explain obscure vocabulary and

historical and cultural phenomena, indicate mistakes and incon-

sistencies in the text etc.

Appendices could include transcriptions of manuscripts, lists

of editions and translations and illustrations planned or included

in early volumes plus samples from other illustrations. If the

copy text was illustrated, then the illustrations will be placed in

the text.

While the basic edition will be scholarly and documentary, the

Additional Resources and spinoff paperback volumes should

provide stimulating and attractive reading and visual materials

for a wide range of users.

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Stevenson: Notes and Queries

With the launch of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected

Works of Robert Louis Stevenson the Journal of Stevenson

Studies invites brief essays, bibliographical information, and/or

Notes and Queries, relating to any of the following:

• The whereabouts of uncatalogued material

• Unpublished biographical information

• Supplementary material and emendations to Swearingen's

The Prose Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

• Information on Stevenson's collaborations

• Details of Stevenson’s relations with publishers, both

financial and personal

• Distribution and sale of Stevenson's work in Britain and

the USA

• Archive collections and printed guides relating to the

magazines in which Stevenson published

• Information and opinions on different editions published

during Stevenson’s lifetime

• The production of illustrations

• Early reception of individual works (reviews not collected

in Maixner’s Critical Heritage

• Mentions of Stevenson’s works in letters or diaries of

contemporaries, etc.

Alternatively, information not intended for publication may be

sent directly to any of the General Editors, who would be grateful

for any such material:

Stephen Arata: [email protected]

Richard Dury: [email protected]

Penny Fielding: [email protected]

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253JSS Notes

www.robert-louis-stevenson.org

Funded by a grant from the Carnegie Trust,

this new website will be launched in November 2009.

Dedicated to the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, making texts

and information about his life and works freely available worldwide,

www.robert-louis-stevenson.org will be the primary online resource for

students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. Galleries of images of places and

people associated with Stevenson, and of RLS, himself are a particular

feature of the website. It also situates Stevenson firmly in Edinburgh,

focusing on the city’s, and on Scotland’s influence on his writing. At the

same time it will recognise the international dimension to his work and

readership.

Listing past and current scholarly work on RLS, as well as the full texts

and a significant proportion of all the available photographs and images,

this site will reach a world-wide audience, many of whom could not travel

to the places where such items are located. Back numbers of the Journal

of Stevenson Studies will also be posted on this site in full-text format.

The site is established at the Centre for Literature and Writing (CLAW)

at Edinburgh Napier University with support from Edinburgh and

Stirling Universities, literary trusts like the Edinburgh UNESCO City of

Literature, the Writers’ Museum of Edinburgh, and Stevenson enthusi-

asts, museum curators and academics around the globe. It will make a

significant contribution to the growing reputation of RLS as an important

literary figure and personality of the late nineteenth century.

RLSWEBSITE

Stevenson6.indb 253 23/10/2009 19:26


Contribute and Subscribe to The Journal of Stevenson Studies

The Journal of Stevenson Studies offers new and original

insights into the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and the

moral, psychological and cultural ambiguities that he explored

in what was soon to become our modern world.

Edited by Linda Dryden & Roderick Watson

Contributions to future issues are invited and should

be sent to either of the editors as

MS WORD files in MHRA format.

All contributions are subject to peer review by an Editorial

Board of internationally recognised Stevenson scholars.



Centre of Scottish Studies


FK9 4LA

Stevenson6.indb 254 23/10/2009 19:26

255JSS Notes

Volume One 2004, contains essays by Richard Ambrosini,

Steven Arata, Oliver S. Buckton, Liam Connell, Richard Dury,

Vincent Giroud, Douglas S. Mack, Sudesh Mishra, Glenda

Norquay, Olena M. Turnbull, Richard J. Walker, Roderick

Watson.

Volume Two 2005, with essays by Hilary J. Beattie, Sara

Clayson, Richard Dury, Liz Farr, William Gray, Gordon Hirsch,

Jürgen Kramer.

Volume Three 2006, with a poem by Jim C. Wilson and essays

by Giuseppe Albano, Katherine Linehan, Wendy Katz, Katherine

Linehan, Laanvanyan Ratnapalan, Roger G. Swearingen, Saverio

Tomaiuolo.

Volume Four 2007, contained essays by R. L. Abrahamson,

Richard Ambrosini, Hilary J. Beattie, Jenni Calder, Dennis

Denisoff, Cinzia Giglioni, Gordon Hirsch, Mary B. Hotaling,

William B. Jones Jr, Wendy R. Katz, Jürgen Kramer, Ilaria B.

Sborgi, Marilyn Simon, Robert Benjamin Stevenson III, Roderick

Watson.

Volume 5 2008, was the special ‘Stevenson and the Writers’

edition with reflections, memoirs and creative contributions from

Ron Butlin, Alan Grant, Diana Hendry, David Kinloch, Patrick

McGrath, Donal McLaughlin, Barry Menikoff, Cees Nooteboom,

James Robertson, Suhayl Saadi, Louise Welsh, Hamish Whyte.

Stevenson6.indb 255 23/10/2009 19:26


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